Se loger dans un quartier tremplin : trajectoires et stratégies résidentielles des familles immigrantes à Parc-Extension et Saint-Michel, Montréal

This research in urban and social geography investigates the residential trajectories and strategies of immigrant families in Saint-Michel and Parc-Extension, two inner suburbs of immigration in Montreal. While researchers still refer to them as transitional spaces, these two neighborhoods no longer seem to foster the social and spatial mobility of newcomers. Whereas most low-income tenants live in precarious housing situations in the private sector, a handful of immigrant families manage to access the social sector. How can we explain the residential stabilization of immigrant families in Parc-Extension and Saint-Michel and the access to social housing of a minority within these transitional neighborhoods? If there is a tendency to view immigrant families as multi-determined individuals in the housing market, they are still capable of decision-making. The idea is to give back a certain ability to act to families by insisting on the intentionality in their search and successive housing choices, while showing how these residential strategies are affected by specific barriers, notably related to their immigrant identity. To do so, I combine several qualitative survey techniques. Semi-directive interviews and a participatory photography project with 61 immigrant families form the basis of this analysis. If I use the interview transcripts and the photographs to understand the complexity of the residential choices and the housing search process, the systematic work of encoding the interviews helps me to reconstruct the long-term trajectories of the households since their arrival in Montreal. The thirty or so semi-directive interviews conducted with social landlords, elected officials and urban planners, as well as the participant observation carried out as a volunteer within a community organization in each neighborhood, provide an outside perspective on the structures which prevail over these immigrant families. Far from simply making choices on the basis of their immigrant identity, most families select their homes and neighborhoods as parents, the children being at the heart of their residential strategies. However, the structure of the housing supply, information dissemination issues or discriminatory practices by landlords and institutions lead to a social stratification in which the most integrated immigrant households manage to obtain good quality and affordable accommodation, while the most economically, socially and culturally vulnerable families are relegated to the de facto social stock. The ongoing changes in the two neighborhoods affect the projects of the interviewed families and increase their residential insecurity. While I am questioning the long-term continuation of the gateway function in Saint-Michel and Parc-Extension, tenant rights organizations try to compensate for the inaction of public authorities. With a theoretical and methodological intermediate position within studies on residential trajectories, this thesis aims to open up new research perspectives on urban restructuring and residential mobility at work in the transitional neighborhoods of major Canadian cities.

Keyphrases: Immigration, Housing, Immigration, Family, Residential trajectory, Rental market, Public policies, Immigrants' neighbourhood, Intersectionality