Inside the fight by a group of Montreal tenants to stay in their homes

Late one cold evening in February 2021, Adriana Bortas-Pauelesco received a knock at her door. A firefighter stood outside.

Bortas-Pauelesco and the other tenants in the five-storey apartment building nestled against Mount Royal in Montreal's Côte-des-Neiges district were told they had to leave their homes that night. 

Building inspectors had discovered firewalls were removed during renovations and concluded the building was not safe. 

"We were scared, of course. I started to panic," she recalled.

Bortas-Pauelesco, now 79, had only a few hours at the height of one of the worst pandemic waves to pack up her most important belongings. She spent the next four months in hotels. 

A diabetic, Bortas-Pauelesco said she struggled to regulate her blood sugar without access to a kitchen for the first month and a half, until she moved into a room with a kitchenette.

Now back in her small apartment while renovation work continues in many of the units around hers, Bortas-Pauelesco has no plans to leave again despite what she says she endured over the past two years. 

In a complaint filed last year with Quebec's rental tribunal, the Tribunal administratif du logement, Bortas-Pauelesco and the tenants in 17 other units sought compensation for the inconvenience of living in hotels and the costs of cleaning up their apartments when they returned — including, in some cases, the safe removal of hazardous asbestos left behind during construction.

Their complaint also called on the property owners to "cease all harassment with the aim of making the tenants leave." 

An administrative judge declined to rule on the case, saying it was beyond the rental tribunal's jurisdiction. A lawyer representing the tenants is expected to file a claim today in Quebec Superior Court.

The building's owners, Brandon Shiller and Jeremy Kornbluth, purchased the 46-unit building at 3440 Ridgewood Ave. in June 2019 and undertook a major renovation a year later, in September 2020, according to court documents.

In a statement, Kornbluth, speaking on behalf of their company Hillpark Capital, said that it historically "targeted properties that were in good locations but in need of love."

"Often vendors neglected capital expenditures and did very little work in the building for many years," he said. 

In the case of the Ridgewood building, Kornbluth said they waited until a larger number of units were vacant, but the scale of the project "resulted in some unfortunate circumstances for the remaining tenants that had inconveniences while the work was going on."