LIGHT TRAFFIC

© Carolyne Weldon

UNMOVING DAY

by Carolyne Weldon

For the 42nd consecutive year, Alice Leblanc didn’t move out of her Verdun apartment yesterday. As the moving season peaked and thousands of families partook in the city’s annual festival of musical chairs, the 91 year-old Gaspé native cranked the air-conditioning and knitted a pair of slippers while watching her favorite afternoon programs.

“I’ve been in this apartment since 1968,” she said. “And I like it. Unless it’s to the retirement home, I won’t be going anywhere soon”.

Untouched by Montreal’s yearly moving frenzy, Leblanc, an alert nonagerian with piercing greyish-blue eyes and short strawberry-blonde hair, has been renting the four-bedroom apartment at 113, 2nd Avenue in Verdun for all of four decades.

When questioned about her uncommon rootedness, Leblanc said she had nothing against moving “per se”, but that she happens to think it is, considering the expenses involved, a rather frivolous thing to do. “You have to wash everything, then paint everything. Then the curtains don’t fit and must be changed, and the furniture doesn’t fit either. It’s just too expensive”, she said. “And then, of course, there are the landlords who hike the rents every time you sign a new lease someplace.”

Leblanc has kept a rent receipt from January 1982. It indicated that her 6 ½ was then costing her $175, a $60-raise from the $115 per month she said she was paying when she first moved in.

This July, even though she isn’t moving, her current landlord – the second since she’s been there – has announced a $15-rent increase. “This July is the first month I am paying $400,” she said. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”

Although she may be resenting the raise, the Institut de la statistique du Québec confirms that Leblanc’s strategy of not moving has paid off and that most of her Verdun neighbors are shelling out bigger bucks on rent than she is. In 2007, the average gross rental costs in the area were $581. And in Verdun, most people are renting. Indeed, 70% of its residents rent the space in which they live, one the highest rates in Montreal.

In the context of Verdun, Leblanc’s unmoving is somewhat of a rarity. According to statistics compiled by the City of Montreal, Verdun, alongside Plateau Mont-Royal and Ville-Marie, is one of the boroughs where renters are the most mobile. In 2003, 20% of Verdun’s population, or one person out of five, moved. Between 1996 and the 2001, 55% of Verdun dwellers packed up and resettled elsewhere. That figure represents 7% more than the City of Montreal average for that period, 48%.

Despite citywide trends, Leblanc has moved only twice in half a century, since her family took the rural migration route from the Gaspésie to Montreal, in 1958. “The first time we moved because of noise complaints from the man downstairs, who worked night shifts, and the second time it was after both my in-laws, Mémère and Pépère Leblanc, who lived with us at the time, passed away. The kids didn’t want to live in that place anymore. The sadness and memories were too much for them to bear.”

Leblanc said that had it only been for her, she said, she would probably still be living in that apartment where they first landed. “We paid $85 a month. It wasn’t bad,” she said. “I come from a family of small farmers with 17 children. You cherished what you had and wasted nothing. To me, just having a nice, clean, place to call my own is a lot. Sometimes, I think people should be a little bit happy with what they got.”