Short of sufficient shelter spaces for the homeless, the city plans to provide temporary housing in hotels, which have been pretty empty anyway. There hasn’t been much in the news lately about the tent encampments, except this piece in Metro on October 6 about organizations taking up collections to provide more tents. In this report it says the city recognizes there are twice as many homeless people now as at the start of the pandemic, which is why the camps have been growing, and popping up in new parts of town. But winter is coming.
Updates from October, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Three men were arrested Monday and could be charged with mischief for making emergency calls about fake abductions. TVA calls the perpetrators jeunes and suggests they may have been staging pranks to make videos.
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Kate
The mayor was on Tout le monde en parle Sunday evening, and spoke about the need to help downtown recover, about homeless shelters and keeping parks open so we have somewhere we can walk and get some air. TVA noted on the weekend how crowded the parks have been.
Update: As noted in the comments, police closed the parking on Mount Royal Monday afternoon because the park was too crowded for social distancing.
DeWolf
Are we back to park-shaming people who want to leave their apartments on a beautiful day?
DeWolf
(In case it isn’t clear, that’s a rhetorical question, not a comment on Kate’s post or the TVA article.)
Mark Côté
Plants asked people to go to their local parks instead of the popular ones like Mont-Royal.
walkerp
Would be nice if they forced the cemetery to be open to the public as well. Ultimate dog in the manger that it is closed on a Sunday on a holiday long weekend.
jeather
They closed parking at the mountain but luckily you can still go to much safer crowded malls.
Blork
My local park has been jammed for the past two days, probably because La Presse featured it in a photo essay a few days ago. But I don’t really mind sharing. That said, I got my revenge today by going to Île Ste-Helene, which was busy but not crazy.
Ephraim 07:36 on 2020-10-13 Permalink
I would assume that they are looking for lower star hotels that want to refurbish afterward. So don’t expect properties like the St-James (which is closed anyway… cheaper to close than to pay salaries while no one is there.) Hotel Espresso, Arena Palace (likely the worst rated place in Montreal anyway), Labelle, etc. It will give them money to stay alive and cash for later on to replace all the mattresses, carpets, etc. I’m going to go out on a limb and say they will likely chuck most of the room interiors after this.
In the case of some of these places, they may be better suited long term to conversion anyway. There are two types of owners with hotels, those who build up and those who run them into the ground and milk them for all the money they can get until they can sell the property for it’s intrinsic value rather than as an ongoing business.