The hidden face of homelessness in C.D.N.
“Syndy,” 39, isn’t always able to pay the rent for her cockroachinfested apartment.
A crack addict, she has been sleeping on the floor since throwing out her bedbug-infested furniture. Sometimes she sells sex to pay for drugs or the rent.
“Bob” is sharing a basement apartment with a friend after sleeping rough on the old Blue Bonnets site. He has been evicted repeatedly for failing to pay the rent.
Syndy and Bob (not their real names) are among the faces of homelessness in Côte-des-Neiges, according to community organizations in the multicultural neighbourhood, where more than half of residents were born outside of Canada.
While their housing situation is precarious and dangerous to their health, they and others like them are usually excluded from estimates of the homeless.
In March 2015, Montreal conducted a census of the city’s homeless that counted 3,016 people sleeping on the street or in shelters, including only five in Côtedes-Neiges.
According to Bernard Besancenot, a liaison officer at MultiCaf, a community cafeteria on Appleton Ave., the census failed to detect the large number of people living precariously — the so-called hidden homeless.
“The problem with hidden homelessness is precisely that: it’s hidden,” he said.
Police in Côte-des-Neiges have estimated about 40 chronically homeless people sleep in bus shelters, métro entrances and other structures in the district, he said.
But how many live in precarious housing is anyone’s guess. “We don’t know,” he said. What police, hospital staff and outreach workers in the district do know is that it’s not uncommon for seniors to show up in emergency rooms seeking a warm bed, for women to recount that they stayed with an abusive mate because they had nowhere else to go, or for youth to drift from one low-rent dive to another.
“Women’s groups say there are more and more women showing up with their whole life in their bag. When they ask their address, they can’t say,” Besancenot said.
On Wednesday morning, local community organizations are holding a news conference to call on municipal candidates, as well as provincial and federal representatives, to give them tools to deal with hidden homelessness.
“We’re asking for the candidates to acknowledge the reality and to help us get the resources we need,” Besancenot said.
For starters, shelters and supervised apartments are needed, he said.
“There is a huge amount of unsanitary housing in Côte-des-Neiges, with bedbugs, mould, doors that don’t close properly and so on,” he said.
But just providing housing isn’t enough, since many people living precariously have mental-health issues and need to be monitored, he said.
That takes staff dedicated to that particular clientele, he said.
Simply providing housing without dealing with clients’ underlying issues and building a sense of community will not solve the problem, he said.
In 2016, local community groups produced a report on homelessness and precarious housing in Côte-des-Neiges.
On Wednesday, they will unveil an action plan based on that research.
The organizations are seeking $135,000 annually to hire two community workers and one part-time co-ordinator to help 60 people currently in precarious housing move into social housing, and provide support and supervision.
MultiCaf, in co-operation with St. Mary’s Hospital and other groups, is also co-ordinating a pilot project to find family doctors for 25 people at risk of becoming homeless.
Thirty-five per cent of Côte-des-Neiges’s 100,000 residents live in poverty, according to a 2014 report by Centraide. Eighty per cent are tenants, compared to an average of 61 per cent on the island of Montreal, and one out of five apartments are overcrowded.
Fifty-three per cent of residents are immigrants and the same percentage belong to a visible minority.
Homelessness is on the campaign agenda Wednesday, Équipe Denis Coderre said, with a news conference scheduled for 10 a.m. at the community support organization L’Itinéraire.