Ottawa will pay about $7.5 million to fourteen homeowners to make way for the new Champlain Bridge in Montreal.
Ten century homes and four condos in Verdun are slated to be torn down by the end of this year, to make way for construction to start on the bridge.
The plan to demolish the homes came last June, when Ottawa announced that nearby Highway 15 would widen to three lanes so drivers could access the new bridge, which is set to be completed by 2018.
Owners were forced to sell their homes last September, and will have to be out by July. All of the residents have left except for one elderly couple.
Many of the homes on May Street have stood since the 1890s, seeing families like Charles de Mestral’s filter in and out for over a hundred years.
One of them was Mestral’s childhood home, where he lived in the 1950s until he was eight years old.
“I have a lot of memories of the house,” Mestral said. “They say that the first house you lived in is a part of you, and you think about it, you dream about it, you walk upstairs, downstairs and remember rooms and experiences.”
For the current homeowners, Ottawa paid about $5.2 million to the owners to expropriate the homes, according to an access to information request obtained by LaPresse newspaper.
The federal government would also pay an estimated $3.4 million for the homes based on their combined municipal evaluation.
But according to one resident who spoke with CTV Montreal, they were paid based on the estimated market value of the home and not the municipal evaluation.
Ottawa also paid about $150,000 indemnity to each owner.
Now the residents of the area will be left with memories of the small street in Verdun, like those of Mestral’s.
“That’s life, that’s change,” he said. “But it’s kind of moving to remember what it was like to live here.”
With files from CTV Montreal
