By Dan Laxer
The Suburban

Residents of the Darlington district in the CDN-NDG borough may have noticed garden beds and planters, some containing blueberry plants, in Martin Luther King Park. In fact, when a reporter from The Suburban had gone to investigate reports of a homeless encampment in the park, there were workers from the borough installing the garden beds where blueberries and other produce were to be planted. There are several around the park’s baseball field, near the chalet, and in other locations.

And there are large pots also containing blueberries placed along the front face of the park’s chalet, where the homeless encampment was just a few weeks ago. As reported in The Suburban, the homeless people and their belongings had been moved after police and a social worker were called, and the pots were put in place shortly after.

The pots and garden beds are part of the borough’s Nourishing Community Development Plan, whose objective is to help fight food insecurity, “to facilitate access to healthy, local food, right in the communities where residents live,” foster food autonomy and socio-ecological resilience in the face of climate change, reduce the ecological footprint of the food system, and position the borough as proactive in promoting healthy lifestyles.

There are similar planters in other parts of the borough, such as Place Guillaume Couture, a parkette that was a point of contention for area residents when it was installed three years ago. Residents were upset about the short notice, and the loss of parking space and driving access to the streets on which they live.

Stephanie Valenzuela, Ensemble Montréal councillor for the Darlington district, is happy to see the planters in the park, but is also concerned about the homeless people that were there before. The pots being placed in front of the chalet, she says, is “clearly a measure that they put in place in order to remove the homeless encampment that had been there for quite some time.”

Valenzuela says that in the subsequent cleanup, city workers found old discarded syringes that had been tossed into the bushes. The homeless people that had been there before have not returned to the park. “But now they’re dispersed across the borough,” she says, “and we don’t have an idea of where they actually are.” Social workers are having a difficult time finding them. Valenzuela says she hasn’t heard complaints from her constituents of late because the cohabitation issue seems to have been taken care of. Until they actually find the homeless people that had taken up residence in the park, she says, she won’t know for sure if the problem has been solved in the way that she had hoped.

As for the blueberry plants, while they seem to be fine, at night, when there is no supervision, Valenzuela worries that there is no guarantee that they are safe from any kind of mischief. n