Montreal family fights to save home from expropriation for subway ventilation station

MONTREAL — For the last 40 years the four-member Ly family has lived in a Montreal duplex, but after the holidays they will have to find a new home because the city’s public transit agency is expropriating the property to build a subway ventilation station.

In the home in the Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie borough, Trivi Ly and his sister live with and care for their retired elderly parents, ages 72 and 73, who moved into the house in 1984.

Ly said the family was first approached about the ventilation project six years ago, when they told the agency — Société de transport de Montréal, or STM — that they didn’t want to give up the house. Then, six months ago, he said they were surprised to receive a letter from the agency telling 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 said of his parents. “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 said.

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.

Régis said the $560,000 payment is a provisional amount and the family may be entitled to additional compensation. “The expropriation process is still underway and the STM will pay the compensation due in accordance with the law,” Régis said.

The STM said the ventilation project is necessary. “The current ventilation station has reached the end of its useful life and needs to be replaced by a new one to comply with current noise and ventilation standards,” the agency says on its website. The work is scheduled to begin in fall 2026.