Homeless shelters are overwhelmed
Shelters for the homeless are overwhelmed again as temperatures drop, sadly a predictable tick in the yearly news cycle.
Meantime, social housing is struggling with cockroaches. Don’t follow this link if you’re squeamish.
Bill Binns 14:14 on 2018-12-14 Permalink
Why would just social housing have a problem with cockroaches? I lived in two big apartment buildings in this city for years and never saw anything bigger than an ant. Never had any pest control services since I lived here either. What’s going on inside these apartments?
Until that story a few years ago about the Fauborg St Catherine being infested, I didn’t even think cockroaches existed up here. Have also not stepped into the Fauborg since I read that story. Not even the Starbucks.
Blork 16:06 on 2018-12-14 Permalink
Apparently some of the people who live in social housing have a hard time with the basics of looking after themselves. This can be due to health reasons (difficult for them to move around, etc.) or mental health reasons (difficult to understand the point of being clean), or just because they are people with hopeless, terrible lives who were raised in toxic environments where they never learned any life skills. (These are the same people who you want to work at IGA BTW, Bill.)
The result is messiness and unsanitary conditions, which attracts vermin, plus an inability to deal with it once the vermin move in.
The article mentions that there is a program to hire some people to literally go in and tidy up these apartments before the exterminator shows up. That means cleaning up old food containers, picking clothes off the floor, etc. Yowser, what a lousy job.
I’m lucky in that only two of the ten apartments I lived in (on-island) had roaches, and not very many of them. My first apartment was in a high rise, and I saw maybe six roaches in the year I lived there. (And believe me, once I saw the first I became hyper-vigilant). A few years later I spent two years at the top of a triplex in Mile End (before anybody gave AF about Mile End). The first year was roach-free, but then they sprayed the building next door and we had a small invasion. Saw a dozen or so the first week or two and then it went down to about two or three a month until the lease was up and I left.
Now that I am a city-ruining suburbanite, I only have to deal with deer, ground hogs, and racoons. (No coyotes yet.)
Blork 16:08 on 2018-12-14 Permalink
I should add that it only takes one such tenant in a six- or eight-unit building to keep the roach problem alive. Hence the program to find those problem apartments, clean them up, and then exterminate TF out of them.
mare 17:07 on 2018-12-14 Permalink
A friend of mine lives in a rather expensive apartment ($1400 for 500 sqft) near Guy-Concordia metro and not only do they have daily very loud building noises because the building owner is updating the ground floor with shops, but there’s a lot of cockroaches crawling around. Kitchens in the whole 15 stories building are all interconnected via utility spaces and just having one tenant import them (via a box of groceries or another harmless vector) can be enough. They eat some food in every kitchen and multiply in the walls near the pipes. And since getting rid of pests is a landlord problem (not always justified) this is extremely hard and costly when it involves almost hundred apartments.
So it’s not only the poor in social housing that have cockroaches…
Bill Binns 17:19 on 2018-12-14 Permalink
@Blork – If true, that is really terribly unfair to the rest of the folks living in social housing. The “unable to be clean” crowd should really be in some sort of assisted living type situation (with the services of the apartment tidier person that you mentioned).
When I was a kid, we briefly lived in a mixed development where every other apartment was socialized housing and the others were rented out at market value (still cheap). It was the only time in my life that I lived with cockroaches (I have a phobia) and my mother blamed the tenants of the subsidized units for it.
Kate 10:28 on 2018-12-15 Permalink
Bill Binns, people are not static. Picture a person in their 60s who loses their job to a business closure, to automation or some other factor out of their control. They can’t find a new job because most employers aren’t keen on hiring someone so old. They get into social housing and at first everything is fine. Ten, fifteen years pass and they’re declining – they’re not ill enough to need residential care, but their eyesight isn’t great and their energy level is flagging. They’re not organized. They can’t or won’t clean as much as they should. And so on.
I could devise a dozen stories, where because of changing situations a person loses control of the condition of their living quarters, but it’s why you can’t neatly and permanently categorize people as you suggest. Also, mare makes a legit point. The only time I ever had roaches I was in an NDG building and one of the tenants was a loose cannon of bad habits who turned out to have a colony of the things under her fridge. I don’t know what happened after that because I moved out.
Blork 10:52 on 2018-12-15 Permalink
What Kate said. And since when has fairness ever been a factor for people with no money? People are sometimes bound to a neighborhood, for various reasons such as family connections, work/life factors, or even just sentimentality. So what happens when a bunch of latté-sipping motherfu**ers declare your old ‘hood to be the thing, and over the course of a decade the rents triple and the availability of places you can afford is reduced to almost nothing?
If you’re lucky you can hook yourself up with some “social housing” or “affordable housing” or whatever the paperwork is calling it this week. And you end up living in a building that, instead of being mixed like in the old days, is now a concentration of poor people, so the ratio of oddballs and wingnuts is higher than what you’d get under normal circumstances. Plus it’s Montreal 20 years after the tax haters forced the government to close all the supervised housing that kept so many marginal people at least clean and warm and fed, so those people are top of the list for social housing apartments because there is literally nowhere else for them to go.
So there’s you with your IGA cashier’s job, and you can’t afford the $1800 a month hipster apartments in your neighbourhood but you don’t want to move to goddamn Brossard or Greenfield park just for the lower rents, so you end up in social housing, which should be just a regular apartment with subsidized rent to compensate for the market rate inflation but in fact is a distillation of neighbourhood creeps and misfits (as described above) so those are your neighbours. Welcome the something-something rue Notre-Dame.