City of Longueuil purchases rooming house ‘Chez Lise’ in effort to prevent homelessness
Posted August 19, 2026 9:21 am.
Last Updated August 19, 2026 5:42 pm.
The City of Longueuil has purchased one of the largest rooming houses in the area as part of its efforts to prevent homelessness.
Chez Lise is a seven-building rooming house offering 126 affordable housing rooms and apartments, food assistance and other services on Montreal’s South Shore.
The city says it aims to keep the building as affordable housing.
The rooming house had been re-listed for sale for several months after Longueuil had used its right of first refusal to prevent the buildings from being sold in April 2025.
Longueuil Mayor Catherine Fournier says the decision to purchase the rooming house was made in the context of the current housing crisis, social pressure on resources for the homeless and in conjunction with the fact that the buildings aren’t subsidized by the Sociéte d’habitation du Québec (SHQ).
“There was an emergency because Chez Lise is a rooming building that is very, very important for our community,” Fournier said. “We have more than 100 vulnerable persons, vulnerable citizens that are living inside those buildings. So we have this asset that we want to protect and the city can expropriate the buildings considering that we are concerned that the mission won’t be respected if the buildings are sold on the private market.
“So that’s why we use that tool and we intend to expropriate the buildings. We analyzed a lot of scenarios, but the main one is the expropriation.”
The borough mayor also notes that while nothing is going to change for the time being for those living there, occupancy plans and management are already being discussed to guarantee the long-term vitality and existence of the affordable housing complex.
“We wanted to be proactive and go there before the word spreads and to reiterate the engagement of the City of Longueuil to protect their right in the context of homelessness, which is rising importantly on our territory and across Quebec. We cannot lose any room like Chez Lise.
“We will work with the health system, our partners, our community groups who are very mobilized. It’s teamwork and that’s what we intend to do in order to preserve the mission of Chez Lise.”
Sam Watts, the CEO of Welcome Hall Mission, applauded the City of Longueuil’s efforts.
“I congratulate any city that takes a move forward like this and says, ‘You know something, we’re going to protect housing that currently exists,'” said Watts. “That’s one of the sweet spots that we do have here in the Montreal area. In the housing stock that we have, if we renovate it properly, maintain it properly and keep it at the proper pricing, we can actually accommodate a lot more people than are currently being housed in some of those places.
“The challenge of course is that we need to work on keeping people in the housing they already have. Because if we can do that, then it’ll be easier to manage those who fall out of the system.”
