Montrealers with disabilities tell of narrow escapes from homelessness this Moving Day

If you would have spoken to Samantha Andrews just a few days ago, she would have told you she'd be homeless by July 1.

The only reason she isn't is because there's "angels" in the NDG community who came to help her move and find her a new apartment come Moving Day in Quebec, when many leases expire.

She said she's lucky to have found them after sharing her story on Facebook just three days prior.

"I'm emotional, but not because I'm leaving this apartment," Andrews said as she spent her last hours at her NDG apartment on Saturday.

Andrews had an apartment lined up in the neighbourhood about two months ago, but everything fell through after the tenant who had offered her a lease transfer was renovicted by a new landlord.

"I fit nowhere into the equation," Andrews said.

She spent the next month looking for a place. Despite having a stable income with her disability payments, she was turned away from landlords who were looking for a tenant with a higher credit score, she said.

"I'm really lucky because there are hundreds of people who aren't as lucky as me, who are in the street, and that was my greatest fear. I didn't want to be homeless," she said, who found a home Côte-des-Neiges.

"I didn't deserve to be homeless. Neither did they."

As of July 2, more than 600 Quebec households were still without a home after Moving Day, according to the Front d'action populaire en réménagement urbain (FRAPRU), a housing advocacy group in the province.

Kai Steeves was also just days away from being homeless before they signed a lease transfer on June 28 for a place in the Plateau.

"The apartment is nice, but the only reason I'm even able to get this apartment is because there's a huge hole in the ceiling and I'm sharing it with three other people. That's the only way I was able to afford this," Steeves said.

They rely on welfare and say they've struggled to get approved for disability payments.

"I had to hire movers, and unfortunately it means I'm probably not going to be buying groceries for a couple of months, but I do have movers," they said.

Given up under duress

Lucie Sanfaçon is also struggling to recover after hiring movers, except in her case, she wasn't able to start the month in a new home as she had initially expected.

Her co-op in Rosemont had approved her move to a new unit in the building that was more accessible for her, but she said she had to give up the apartment after the co-op board changed the move in date in late June, after she had already hired movers for another day.

"I gave it up under duress," said Sanfaçon, who said she helped co-found the co-op in 2013.

She had initially had June 28 approved as her moving date, she said, until the co-op changed it to July 1, mentioning miscommunication about when the tenant there would be moving out.

She's been allowed to keep living in her original apartment. But there's a cold draft in the winter, which is hard on her fibromyalgia, she said, and the dark, narrow corridors of the apartment make it hard for her to get around with her partial blindness. She said she sometimes falls.

"This is an apartment that's putting my health at risk," Sanfaçon said. "Any switch of temperature is not good."

CBC News reached out to Sanfaçon's co-op but did not hear back by publication.

With all the time she was spending trying to prepare for her move, Sanfaçon said she lost track of the real tragedy she was dealing with. Loki, her pet ferret, had been suffering with a urinary tract infection and needed urgent surgery.

After all the costs associated with the failed move, she wasn't able to afford the surgery, which would have cost over $2,000, she said.

"Mistakes were made. These mistakes were not my responsibility," she said.