Montreal City Weblog

Kate 13:44 on 2019-11-20 Permalink Reply  

• SMD 14:28 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

  This is all well and good, but it frustrates me how the link is never made between homelessness and the evicting of precarious populations from working-class neighbourhoods. Where does the city think homeless people come from? Often from neighbourhoods like mine, where they were able to live simply and cheaply until speculators and developers made their homes their playground. My neighbour got renovicted from his long-term home this spring. He slept in various garages and parks all through the summer, often coming to my place for a meal and a shower. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t find a place he could afford in our rapidly-gentrifying neighbourhood (and there’s a decade wait for social housing). The last time I saw him he said he had a good lead on a place further north, and I really hope he found a roof before the snow fell. Like the director of the Old Brewery Mission said earlier this year, evictions of the working class are “generators of homelessness.”

• Ephraim 21:05 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

  It’s not from the neighbourhoods, it was a function of getting rid of rooming houses without thinking about replacing them. The problem is that rooming houses are difficult to manage… and they aren’t usually profitable to manage. We need help in this area. This is the part of housing that needs fixing

• Filp 21:25 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

  Couple that with drug addiction and mental issues, and homelessness becomes way more complicated than high rent. I mean, often when someone can’t afford their rent, plan B isn’t to sleep in the metro station. It’s to move further away. At least for the chronically homeless, who are the most visible, it is doubtful they ended up in that situation from a purely monetary perspective. If your unresolved mental issues mean you can’t hold a job, low rent won’t cut it. And with drug addiction, the money you get probably isn’t going directly to rent anyway.

  It can be debated whether deinstitutionalisation was a mistake, but certainly what came after was not properly organized. We went from abusive services to inadequate services

• Michael Black 22:05 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

  I’m not sure that’s quite right. One big problem is that you can’t tell what state someone was in when they became homeless, and what is the result of their situation. However someone lands in the situation, it can be devastating. You pretty much lose everything, making it really hard to come back even under good conditions. And the wear and tear of being homeless can drag people down even further. So is someone doing drugs or drinking because that brought them there, or because living homeless causes them to kill the pain?

  I’m not sure it’s that important why someone ends up homeless. Maybe it can preempt some from landing there, though I’m not sure that’s seen as too important. But there are many barriers to coming back. Drinking and drugs don’t help, but I think other issues are bigger.

  Michael

• Ephraim 07:45 on 2019-11-21 Permalink

  We already know that getting someone into stable housing is the first step to solving most of the problems. The federal government is housing first. The problem is that in the 1980s we had this movement away from rooming houses and that was affordable housing for singles. We have shared housing, but that needs stability and cooperation. And some people just want their own place, even if they can’t afford it. We need rooming houses and/or microhomes. But a rooming house is tough. The person who owns them and runs them just isn’t equipped or taught how to deal with people who aren’t sober… and they flock to that accommodation. I lived near one and the guy who ran it kicked out anyone who wasn’t sober, because he just couldn’t deal with it and it’s effects on others.

  It’s a tough problem without a quick solution.And we already know that you can’t create sobriety until after you have stability. But you also have to want to be sober.

• david10000 20:08 on 2019-11-21 Permalink

  Micro apartments are absolutely necessary. I lived in one for a year off Park Lafontaine for a year and it was heaven – nothing to clean, nothing to do maintain, lived spare.

  Here again, zoning in Montreal is creating all sorts of problems.

  Change the zoning on the Plateau, and on a typical triplex lot, you could have 70 people living there instead of 7. Rinse/repeat, and rents start to drop, or at least rate of increase does. As long as Montreal has jobs and universities, and Canada allows immigration, people will continue moving to Montreal. We need to build in the areas people want to live.