The mayor of Longueuil, Catherine Fournier, stands outside the Complexe Cousineau. Once a bustling mall, it sits mostly empty with boarded-up windows, broken glass and a huge, empty parking lot.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
Ongles Cartise, a colourful nail salon, is the last business operating on the Complexe Cousineau mall’s southeastern façade in Longueuil, Que.
Crumbling signs and Google Street View archives show that a driving school, a martial arts gym, a convenience store, a bar, a tailor, a Canada Post office, a shoemaker, a travel agency and several other businesses all shut down or moved over the past two decades.
A busy Metro grocery store and a pharmacy are still open on the north side, but mostly what’s left of the once-bustling mall are boarded-up windows, broken glass and a huge empty parking lot.
“It’s really a disgrace to the neighbourhood,” said Longueuil Mayor Catherine Fournier in an interview in December. “People are embarrassed, people talk to us about it.”
Longueuil, just across the river south of Montreal, wants to redevelop the site. But the mall’s owner, Maurice Benisti, who bought it in 2009 for $11-million through a numbered company, is not interested. The city can do little to force him, except to issue thousands of dollars in fines for violations of urban-planning rules and fire safety bylaws, which the owner ignores while the value of the property soars by millions.
A neon sign reading 'Loans on jewellery / We buy gold' remains in one of the empty storefronts.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Benisti said the city is abusing its power through fines. “Look, it’s my place and I decide what to do,” he said in a phone interview. “Each one has to be responsible for his own and it’s not by bullying a citizen who pays taxes that they’re going to win.”
Louis-Philip Prévost, from Ms. Fournier’s office, said in an e-mail that Mr. Benisti has accumulated 122 unpaid, contested fines totalling $163,716, including fees, since 2021.
The fines, however, are dwarfed by the increase in real estate value. Even as the mall rots, the more than 46,700-square-metre property’s evaluation went from $12,673,400 in 2020 to $15,429,200 in 2023, according to Longueuil property records.
Asked whether he has any plans for the site, Mr. Benisti said he had to go and hung up the phone. He did not answer follow-up questions sent by e-mail.
The city has long been trying to establish a dialogue with Mr. Benisti, who is also the founder and CEO of Montreal clothing brand Point Zero. But, at least since Ms. Fournier was elected in 2021, Longueuil staff never got so much as a reply from him, she said.
The decaying structure sits on prime suburban real estate, next to major roads and the historical centre of Saint-Hubert, now a Longueuil borough.
Only one business, the Ongles Cartise nail salon, is operating on the Complexe Cousineau mall’s southeastern facade.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
A 1988 ad celebrating the Complexe Cousineau’s 10th anniversary in Le Courrier du Sud, a local newspaper, described the mall and its then-75 merchants as “a series of successes that all have the same explanation: attention paid to customer needs.”
Metro, which rents spaces in the mall for its grocery store and a Jean Coutu pharmacy, sued the owner over the property’s derelict state. In a 2022 judgment, the Superior Court described a parking lot full of potholes and without a single working street light. Garbage went uncollected and snow was not cleared. Inside, there were multiple break-ins to squat, vandalize and steal copper piping, with intruders leaving behind syringes, condoms, graffiti and excrement. Vacant spaces left unheated froze sprinkler pipes.
The judge ordered Mr. Benisti’s company to hire a security guard, heat the building and clean it up. But Metro spokesperson Geneviève Grégoire said in a phone interview that similar issues persisted, forcing parties back in court. (The latest judgment was not yet public at the time of publication).
Like other young Quebec mayors, Ms. Fournier, 32, has pushed for densification to alleviate the housing shortage, ease transit and protect what little remains of natural areas after decades of encroachment. The mall site, she said, represents Saint-Hubert’s biggest potential for redevelopment. She envisions a mixed-use project including market-price and social housing, along with shops and, perhaps, non-profit organizations’ offices.
“One of the greatest needs, if not the greatest need, that we are facing at the moment is the housing crisis,” Ms. Fournier said.
Longueuil’s population increased by 6.1 per cent between the 2016 and 2021 censuses, higher than the rest of Quebec and Canada. The province’s fifth-biggest city, it neared 263,000 residents in 2023.
Rents have climbed as the housing supply fell behind demographic growth. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., the median rent in Longueuil went from $800 in 2020 to $1,097 in 2024. The latest vacancy rate was 1.3 per cent.
David Gordon, a professor at Queen’s University’s department of geography and planning, estimates that about 700 residential units could be built on the site in mid-rise buildings, or “more if towers were permitted.” The Complexe Cousineau “is a classic case of a ‘dead mall’ that is not quite dead yet,” a common issue in medium-sized communities across North America, Dr. Gordon said.
In a social-media post this fall, Ms. Fournier said the city cannot legally intervene on the property without a court order, even to do maintenance or clean up. And taxpayers would foot the bill, “which we consider unacceptable given that the situation is the sole responsibility of the owner,” she wrote.
The last resort would be expropriation, which entails its own complications. “We would embark on legal proceedings for several years, it could drag on for a very long time, in addition to the costs that the city would incur,” Ms. Fournier said.
She was hoping to meet and discuss the site’s future directly with Mr. Benisti in the coming months, but he declined the invitation in mid-December, the mayor’s office said.