MONTREAL– For the last 40 years the four-member Ly family members has actually resided in a Montreal duplex, however after the vacations they will certainly need to discover a brand-new home due to the fact that the city’s public transportation firm is expropriating the home to develop a train air flow terminal.
In the home in the Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie district, Trivi Ly and his sis deal with and look after their retired senior moms and dads, ages 72 and 73, that relocated right into your home in 1984.
Ly claimed the family members was very first come close to regarding the air flow job 6 years earlier, when they informed the firm– Soci été de transportation de Montr éal, or STM– that they really did not wish to quit your home. Then, 6 months earlier, he claimed they were stunned to get a letter from the firm informing them to be out by mid-November
“They’re very upset and they’re sad because they don’t want to leave this house,” Ly claimed of his moms and dads. “That’s the first home that they bought so they really want to stay there and leave the house to the kids for the next generation.”
Ly managed to secure a two-month extension to stay in the house until the end of January, giving the family some much-needed time to find a new place to live.
He said the family was offered $696,000 to leave, but then the transit agency knocked down its price by $100,000 after the house was inspected. Finding a similar duplex — with two private parking spaces — in that price range in the same neighbourhood has been “impossible,” he claimed.
On Thursday, Ly attended a transit agency budget meeting at Montreal City Hall. He said the STM has still not clearly demonstrated to his family why it chose to seize their home when there were other options nearby for the ventilation station.
The STM says it has the right to seize the property, citing Quebec’s public transit law.
After finding out about the expropriation in November, some people in the neighbourhood have rallied behind the Ly family. A petition on change.org to stop the STM reached nearly 2,900 signatures as of Friday afternoon.
Tristan Desjardins Drouin is one of the petitioners who has leaped to the family’s defence. He said there are other nearby sites — some vacant — that are better suited for ventilation stations.
“We want the STM to redo the analysis and really take into consideration the people’s side of the story,” he said.
STM spokesperson Amélie Régis said the agency studied “a dozen locations” before settling with the Ly home.
“It was this location that best met the STM’s needs,” she said in an email last week. But on Friday, Régis said it would check if a parcel of land owned by Quebec’s infrastructure arm was available instead of the Ly home. The agency had asked the corporation in 2021 for the land, but was refused.
