Longueuil had a population of 254,483 and 117,006 private housing units according to the 2021 census. The key figure for pest control lies elsewhere: 39.0% of the housing stock was built between 1961 and 1980, and 49.1% of occupied housing units are apartments in buildings with fewer than five stories. The predominant type of housing here is therefore the small brick apartment building with four to twelve units, which is now between forty-five and sixty-five years old.
This type of building shares everything: a slab, shared walls, a plumbing riser, an electrical conduit, a laundry room, and a trash room. A German cockroach that finds food on the second floor doesn’t need a door to reach the third. A mouse that enters through the crawl space can move from one apartment to another through pipe openings, without ever crossing a hallway. Treating each apartment individually rarely yields lasting results in a local rental building.
The rest of the picture follows the same pattern. 6.8% of housing units—7,655 in total—require major repairs, and 36.0% of households consist of single-person households, which increases the number of underoccupied homes where an infestation can spread unnoticed. Vieux-Longueuil also retains a core of houses built before World War II, which are in the minority citywide: stone foundations, exposed joists, and low crawl spaces require a different type of inspection than that of a 1970s apartment building. We adapt our protocol to both types.
Sources consulted for this page: City of Longueuil · Longueuil Open Data · 2021 Census Profile, Statistics Canada.
