In late September 2024, numerous copy-and-pasted posts on several social media platforms attacked U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris' claim that she grew up with a middle-class background by citing the fact she spent her high school years in a wealthy suburb of Montreal.
These posts often contained images of at least one — if not all — of the following three mansions to illustrate that point:
Those photos were generally accompanied with some variation of this text:
KAMALA HARRIS - Grew up in Westmount Quebec, as she reports a Middle Class, Working Class Neighborhood.
The average home sales price in Westmount is $2,275,000, or $878/sqft. When you buy a home in Westmount, you can expect to pay between $1,337,500 to $2,997,500.
While it is true that Harris lived in Westmount during her high school years, none of these photos depicts a home that Harris occupied. The images come from high-profile real estate listings or are of notable historic homes. Harris' mother never owned property in Westmount.
As reported by The Washington Post and other outlets, Harris' mother rented the upper floor of a duplex on Grosvenor Avenue in Lower Westmount, a location she picked to ensure her daughters could be educated at the English-speaking public high school in that district.
In this story, Snopes explains the circumstances under which Harris grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s and why her presence in Westmount does not conflict with her descriptions of growing up middle-class.
What Was Harris Doing in Canada?
When Harris was 12 — in 1976 — she moved from Berkeley, California, to Montreal. Her mother, cancer researcher Shyamala Gopalan, had taken a research position affiliated with McGill University there.
Harris first enrolled in a French-language school — a difficult experience, she described in her memoir. The next year, she enrolled in a bilingual, arts-focused school near the McGill campus. After that, she attended the English-language Westmount High School — something that required her mother's residence in the area.
Harris arrived at Westmount High at a time when both the city and the school were experiencing significant political tumult caused by new language laws. Much of the English-speaking population left the city, causing the closure of other high schools to which the Harris family might have transferred, as described by The Washington Post:
After years of deepening conflict over the French-speaking majority's treatment, a political party advocating political separation from Canada had recently taken power. Tens of thousands of English-speaking families fled as stringent new language restrictions took effect.
[…]
The new law narrowed her educational options as nearly 100,000 English-speaking residents fled Quebec in 1977, according to a New York Times report. By the account of several of Harris's friends, the English-oriented high school she was likely to attend in the fall of 1978 was among many slated for closure amid that upheaval.
Where Did Harris Live During This Time?
The Washington Post identified Kamala Harris' high-school-era residence as "the second floor of a duplex building on fashionable Grosvenor Avenue, about a 30-minute walk from Westmount High." For a time, she shared her room with friend and classmate Wanda Kagan, who was suffering abuse at home.
A photo of the street used by the Post featured a house, but as the featured home is not a duplex, it is unlikely to show the actual residence she lived in. There are, however, several duplex buildings in the area directly surrounding that house, according to Google Street View, and this area is a roughly 30-minute walk from Westmount High.
"They rented part of a house in lower Westmount, which is perfectly nice but not especially luxurious," former Westmount High student Andrew Phillips wrote in a Toronto Sun opinion piece.
Middle Class in Westmount?
As described in the 2024 Toronto Sun story, Westmount High retains, to this day, a connotation of old-money wealth, even though that has not been its reality since before Harris arrived:
Westmount High School is a public anglophone school that is more diverse and less privileged than its name suggests, with its connotations of old Montreal money. It drew from Westmount, the largely Black Little Burgundy to the south and beyond.
When she arrived at the school in 1978, the racial and economic demographics of the once-dominantly white and wealthy institution were changing rapidly, as described by The Washington Post:
The school was undergoing de facto integration. When teacher David Bracegirdle had started a few years earlier, he'd watched as limousines pulled up and dropped off students at the mostly White school.
As Harris arrived, Black students, many from nearby Caribbean-dominated communities, were on the way to becoming about 40 percent of the roughly 1,000 students, making the school among the most diverse in Quebec, according to former students and teachers. Westmount was so crowded that some classes were held on the auditorium stage, according to Bracegirdle.
While the median home price in Westmount is — as these anti-Harris memes suggest — much higher than the national average, these stats also highlight the danger of making inferences from averages. As of 2020, Westmount had the highest income inequality of any location in Canada as reported by the CBC:
The Montreal area is home to municipalities with the most extreme income gaps in the country, as well as Canada's most equal communities, according to a new analysis of Statistics Canada data.
Income inequality, known for its corrosive effects on health, happiness and community ties, is worse in Westmount, Que., than in any other place in Canada, according to a ranking assembled by the Local News Data Hub at Toronto Metropolitan University.
The highest earning 10 percent of households in Westmount made nearly 11 times more than the lowest earning 10 percent in 2020.
Such a distribution does not preclude the existence of a middle or lower class in Westmount — it actually necessitates its existence. Harris's descriptions of her time in Westmount, reinforced by those of her friends and fellow classmates, is consistent with her claims to growing up middle-class.
The Bottom Line
Harris did not grow up in any of the palatial homes pictured in memes about her time in Westmount. She lived in the upper-floor of a duplex rented by her mother. Despite its old-money connotations, Westmount had plenty of middle-class residents in the late 1970s — just as it does today.