A shortage of affordable housing, the opioid crisis and the lingering effects of the pandemic have contributed to a rise in visible homelessness. Ten Montrealers share their stories.
https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/unhoused
Sept 25, 2023
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Story and photos by Verity StevensonSep. 25, 2023
At the camp where Conrad has spent the last three years of his life, everything has its place. A fuzzy red bath mat, a towel and a couple of sweaters hang on a clothesline outside his tent. A barbecue sits on top of some bookshelves. The earth has been swept with a broom and a small drainage ditch draws a circle around the tent.
“It’s a lot of work,” he says. He tries to keep the tent warm with an insulated tarp. “I’ve got my heater, my Coleman stove. It’s not hot but at least, with the tarp, the cold doesn’t really get in.”
Conrad, 61, wants to apply for subsidized housing and an outreach worker who visits him on this day in early September assures him he’ll get it. Conrad smiles and thanks the man, but he’s skeptical. “Five different people like you have told me, ‘You won’t spend the winter there!’ But I’m still here.”
The number of unhoused people in Quebec nearly doubled from 2018 to 2022, according to a provincial survey released earlier this month.
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The survey found that about 10,000 people in the province did not have a home, a 44 per cent increase from the previous survey four years ago. More than half of them are in Montreal, though the survey showed a growing proportion of unhoused people are now spread out across the province.
The issue isn’t in Quebec alone. Cities across Canada have seen increases in homelessness. The rising cost of living, a shortage of affordable housing, the opioid crisis and the lingering effects of the pandemic have all contributed, experts say.
“There’s certainly more visible homelessness and what we’re seeing right now in the ecosystem is more complex situations,” says Sam Watts, the director of Welcome Hall Mission, an organization that serves people experiencing homelessness in Montreal.
CBC Montreal interviewed people in unhoused situations over a week this month in Montreal. These are their stories.
Yves Saintil
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In March 2020, Yves Saintil’s cleaning business was thriving. He had four employees and was juggling nearly 20 clients, most of them bars.
“I was about to buy my own house. I was about to buy a car for two of my kids,” Saintil, 44, says. “Everything was going great.”
He remembers getting the first notifications on his cellphone that bars and restaurants were closing: “I was like, ‘What the f— am I going to do now?’ Sorry.”
Saintil let his employees go and, by the time the second shutdown came, Saintil was burning through his savings. He lost the apartment he and his girlfriend had recently moved into in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. She went to stay with her parents and Saintil (whose mother died years ago and whose father lives in Florida) opted to sleep on friends’ couches until he figured out a solution.
In the meantime, rents were getting higher and the cost of living was going up. Months passed. He spent some nights outside, though he says that only happened a couple times. During the day, he’d go to Café Mission — a day shelter operated by the Old Brewery Mission shelter.
Last winter, he finally asked if the mission had a place for him to live 24/7. Saintil now sleeps in a dorm with two dozen other men. He says it’s not always peaceful but he’s grateful to have a place to stay while he figures out his next steps. Asking for help has been difficult. The shelter’s workers barely have time to chat or take their own breaks.
“I don’t like asking people to help me search for jobs because I know I’m capable,” he says.
Some former clients have even reached out, asking if he’d come back to clean for them, but he’s worried they’ll find out about his living situation.
“Can I tell somebody that I’m living here?”
Saintil says this is first time he’s made his story public. “Not everybody understands it and that’s a big issue in our society.”
Caroline
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Caroline has been at the Old Brewery Mission’s women’s shelter for a few weeks and she’s hoping it won’t be for much longer. When Covid hit, she lost her communications job at an events management company. Faced with the stress of losing her job, the isolation wrought by the pandemic and an injury from a bike accident that prevented her from doing her usual marathon training, Caroline relapsed on an alcohol addiction she thought she’d left in the past.
“Being alone during Covid was horrible,” she says, sitting in a small room at the brightly-painted shelter. CBC has agreed not to use Caroline’s last name because she fears speaking publicly about her situation could affect her future employment. After the relapse, she returned home to France to undergo free public addictions therapy and take care of her ailing father.
But in June of this year, it was time to return to Quebec, “mon pays de coeur” — the country that stole her heart. Plus, she wanted to get her permanent residency after years of wading through bureaucracy to get it. When she got back, Caroline says, “everything had changed in a year and a half. The cost of life, the difficulty of finding a job, all of it.”
She began to have conflicts with her roommate, relapsed again and was hospitalized. Caroline says that’s when she realized she needed to be somewhere with supervision. She spent two days making 40 calls a day until she found a bed at the Old Brewery Mission.
“I noticed there were a lot more shelters for men than for women,” Caroline says. “I feel really lucky to be here until I find myself again, stabilize.”
The week after we spoke, she attended a five-day employment workshop.
Azeez, Joseph and Kazeem
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Azeez, Joseph and Kazeem arrived at the Montreal airport from Nigeria within weeks of each other this summer. They are among a growing number of asylum seekers coming to Canada by air instead of by foot, since the unofficial border crossing known as Roxham Road was closed after changes to the Canada-U.S. Safe-Third Country Agreement. Dozens of people still find their way to Canadian airports every day.
Their welcome was far different from what they’d anticipated, given Canada’s reputation for housing asylum seekers upon arrival. CBC has agreed not to use the men’s last names as all three say they faced threats in Nigeria.
Joseph says he spent 47 days sleeping outside and in the city’s Metro network.
“I didn’t have any money on me. So I have to beg to eat,” Joseph says.
Azeez slept outside a church downtown for two weeks, heading into a nearby Metro station when the cool night air or rain became unbearable.
“Talking about it is bringing it to my head and it’s making me feel—,” Azeez says, putting his palm to his forehead. “It’s been hell staying outside. It’s really been hell.”
Kazeem heard early on about the YMCA on the western edge of downtown Montreal that houses asylum seekers, but when he got there soon after his flight, he was told the shelter was full. He slept on benches at the park across the street for five nights. All three men say they would often try to approach Black people on the street on the off chance they were Nigerian, too, or knew where they could go.
In Kazeem’s case, the effort paid off. He encountered a Nigerian man who is a nurse and speaks his native Yoruba. The man brought him food and a jacket, and referred him to Siari, a group offering language and administrative help to refugees.
Siari then connected Kazeem to the Welcome Hall Mission, which has set up a separate dorm for asylum seekers, where the three men have been staying.
The dorm only has nine beds, so some asylum seekers will spend time in the regular shelter, says Fequiere Desir, who runs the mission’s building near Griffintown. The mission wants to avoid newly arrived refugees from falling into drugs and becoming unhoused long term, Desir says.
Conrad and Geneviève
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To Conrad, the next best thing to an apartment is his little plot of claimed land bordering a bike path and some train tracks that cut through the city. Conrad has two neighbours, one man in his 60s and another in his 70s. All three live in tents.
They’ve tried to keep others from setting up camp in the same spot, doing their best to avoid the fate of 224 encampments already dismantled by the City of Montreal this year. CBC also agreed not to publish Conrad and Geneviève’s last names due to the precariousness of their living situations.
Conrad worries a new encampment nearby, where people do drugs and things can get unruly, will attract the attention of police. He and his camp mates allow guests from time to time, like his friend Geneviève. Conrad hosts group dinners, too, cooking up a storm on the grill. He buys his food from grocery stores with the money he makes collecting cans.
“I take care of everybody. People who are on the streets, they’re like me so I help them.” He prefers braving the elements, even the Quebec winters, to staying in a shelter, where nights can be restless and rowdy. Before pitching his tent here, Conrad stayed in a shelter near Mont-Royal Metro station. During the pandemic, the place got busy and he’d already been there a while, so he opted to leave.
Conrad says he’s been homeless for five or six years. He moved out of an apartment his stepmother had been helping him pay for when her payments stopped coming and he didn’t want to ask anymore. “I said, ‘I don’t need you guys. No problem: tent, camping, sleeping bag. I don’t mind.’”
He adds: “I like being alone. I’m a rebel.”
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