FRAPRU

By Dan Laxer
The Suburban

As part of a week of action by FRAPRU (Front d’action populaire en réaménagement urbain), three housing groups in the west end of Montreal took turns occupying public land in different parts of the city.

The groups, POPIR- Comité Logement, the Citizen Action Committee of Verdun (CACV), and Regroupement Information Logement, spent the latter half of last week, May 21 to 24, occupying sites that have been “abandoned or threatened by private projects,” according to a press release. “All illustrate the same impasse: in the absence of an ambitious and sustainable Quebec program, social housing is slow to see the light of day while the rental crisis deepens.”

One of the properties occupied by the activists, at 4000 St. Patrick in Cote Saint Paul, is the site of the old Canada Power Boat Company, a firm that manufactured torpedo boats during World War II. Before that it was a World War I shipbuilding plant. It had also more recently served as a kind of artists’ community. And there is a sign from an old car detailing outfit.

But it’s now a decrepit, shattered, crumbling shell, empty save for a handful of squatters.

The City of Montreal expropriated the building in 2012 under then-mayor Gérald Tremblay (who would soon resign after corruption allegations).

The property, says Flav Choquette of POPIR-Comité logement, is 28,000 square meters, “as big as four football fields.” There are proposed projects for the lot that came out of a design competition held in 2021. The firm that won, Sid Lee Architecture, says it’s hoping to start work this year on Les Ateliers Cabot, named for a nearby street. The project is described as “an artistic, entrepreneurial and technological hub,” comprising art studios and exhibition space, a food hub with “a large greenhouse for urban agriculture, a cluster for tech companies as well as accommodation for artists and a hotel.”

“We don’t get it,” says Choquette. It’s an ambitious project that would have people living in the complex in the short term, which means, they said, that the infrastructure would be there for people to live in the neighbourhood long-term. And that is what the three agencies are calling for. “In the middle of the housing crisis and homelessness crisis, we need social housing.”

FRAPRU is calling on the provincial government to fund 10,000 new social housing units per year in order to double the number of social housing units within the next fifteen years. They also want to see programs in place that meet the needs of social housing tenants.

“Solutions exist,” says Choquette, “but they are hampered by the lack of stable public funding.”

Nicholas Di Penna-Harvest of Regroupement Information Logement agrees, saying the occupations are “to remind the Quebec government that the housing crisis is not inevitable.”

The three groups gathered with a group of local residents to talk about their needs and possible solutions. They also held a similar session over the weekend at the Ethel parking facility in Verdun, one of the last remaining sites, the groups say, available for social housing. “As long as this land remains empty,” says Camille Roffoli of CACV, “it’s Verdun families who are footing the bill.”

The week of action ended with an event that began at Joe Beef Park on Centre Street in the city’s Sud-Ouest sector.

On that same day the City of Montreal announced a series of investments amounting to more than $25 million over the next three years to address homelessness, including an $8 million increase for its Homelessness and Inclusive Environments program.

It also announced financial deals with groups who help homeless people avoid the courts, to help with social reintegration, as well as for investments for Accueil Bonneau, Action-Réinsertion, and the St. Michel Mission. n