THE LEGACY OF MILTON PARK
Starting in 1968, Dimitri Roussopoulos helped spearhead a grassroots campaign to save his neighbourhood from demolition, giving rise to Canada’s biggest housing co-operative. Today, at age 80, he has lost none of his zeal for urban reform and environmenta
Canada’s biggest housing co-operative, inaugurated in 1983, marks a milestone in the history of community activism and urban housing. Dimitri Roussopoulos, a key catalyst, looks back at the battle won — and what might have been for a city where highrise construction and demolition by neglect remain the rule. Marian Scott reports in
“Welcome to the Republic of Milton Park,” Dimitri Roussopoulos says, standing at the intersection that gives Canada’s biggest housing co-operative its name.
The air in said republic must agree with Roussopoulos, a book publisher, writer, community organizer and co-founder of the Milton Park Community, which spreads across six blocks just east of McGill University.
At 80, he could pass for 20 years younger. And six decades of activism have not dimmed his zeal for urban reform and environmental causes.
Roussopoulos invited the Montreal Gazette on a walking tour of the district, which local citizens saved from the wrecking ball in the 1970s.
Milton Park is among dozens of Montreal neighbourhoods being featured this weekend on Jane’s Walks — an annual event in 212 cities that pays homage to author and urban activist Jane Jacobs.
Jacobs (1916-2006), a New Yorker who fought slum clearance and expressway construction in the 1950s and ’60s, is best remembered for her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which challenged the prevailing wisdom at the time by charging that “urban renewal” was killing vibrant downtown neighbourhoods.
The stroll through the district bordered by Hutchison, Milton and Ste-Famille Sts. and Pine Ave. is a trip down memory lane, as Roussopoulos reminisces about the David-and-Goliath struggle that led to the founding of the community — now home to more than 1,000 mixed-income residents in 16 co-ops and six non-profit associations.
Inaugurated on Sept. 23, 1983, Milton Park was a milestone in the history of community activism and urban housing.
“We’ve taken six blocks of prime, downtown land off the capitalist marketplace,” Roussopoulos says.
“And that’s why we’ve become a kind of a zoo. People come from all over the world to look at us.”
But to his great regret, Milton Park is the exception in a city where highrise construction and demolition by neglect remain the rule.
“I’m always invited to various European universities to talk about this project. But I’m tired of talking about it because you can’t multiply it in Montreal. In my own city, I can’t multiply it,” he says.
“So we need to put together a social movement, a political force to say, ‘Look, urban land cannot continue to be a football in the marketplace. You have to find other solutions on which you build housing as a right.’
“And until that happens, we have a problem.”
In 1968, residents of the turnof-the-century neighbourhood learned developer Concordia Estates Ltd. was planning to evict them for a $250-million commercial-residential project.
Protest was the order of the day — especially next door at McGill, a hotbed of student movements opposing the Vietnam War and McGill’s status as an anglo bastion.
“Now, 1968 was the year that the world came closest to world revolution,” Roussopoulos recalls.
“They chose the wrong year,” he says of the developers.
The Milton Park Citizens’ Committee, of which Roussopoulos and his wife, Lucia Kowaluk, were founding members, rallied opposition by staging demonstrations, distributing pamphlets and organizing street festivals.
When bulldozers moved in in the spring of 1972 to demolish the heart of the neighbourhood, 59 protesters staged a sit-in at Concordia Estates’ offices on Park Ave.
“We were arrested and went off to jail. We had a trial three months later,” Roussopoulos says.
Defence lawyers called urban planners to testify in support of the demonstrators, who had been charged with mischief.
“They said this is a viable neighbourhood and it should not be destroyed.
The jury took exactly eight minutes and came out. They found us not guilty,” Roussopoulos says.
Roussopoulos pauses in front of a row of greystone buildings on Jeanne-Mance St.
“On this sidewalk, one day in 1968, I was walking with Jane Jacobs,” he says.
“She stopped here and she said, ‘Dimitri, you have to work with the community to save this neighbourhood. It cannot be destroyed.’
“So I got my marching orders. And I think we executed them rather well,” he says.
By midsummer 1972, Concordia Estates had torn down 255 houses and begun construction on the first phase of La Cité, a five-tower hotel-office-apartment complex in corrugated beige concrete, connected by an underground mall.
But the project proved a financial flop, failing to attract the anticipated number of businesses and residents.
Meanwhile, the city passed a zoning bylaw limiting building heights in the remainder of the Milton Park district, preventing future phases of the La Cité project from being built.
In 1979, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) bought the properties that had not been demolished for $5.5 million so they could be converted into cooperative housing.
An arm of Heritage Montreal, headed by preservationist Phyllis Lambert, managed the renovation and handover to co-ops and non-profit housing associations, at a total cost of $30.7 million.
Co-ops are a type of non-profit housing where residents vote and make decisions, while non-profit housing organizations are administered for but not by residents.
But Milton Park never became a model for other downtown neighbourhoods, as its founders had hoped.
In 1986, the Montreal Citizens’ Movement swept to power on a platform of reform, including better protection for heritage and tenants’ rights. But when a developer announced plans to raze the Overdale neighbourhood, south of René Lévesque Blvd. in western downtown, for a $100-million condo project, then-mayor Jean Doré gave the green light.
Among the Victorian buildings slated for demolition was the home of former prime minister Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine, the father of responsible government in Canada.
“Overdale was a population like Milton Park — there were a lot of young people and older residents,” Roussopoulos notes.
“We tried to help them, to teach them how to do community organizing and to try to save the neighbourhood. We didn’t get anywhere with Doré and his gang.”
The Doré administration refused to support a housing co-op on Overdale Ave. because it would mean forgoing future tax revenues from the proposed condo project, Roussopoulos says.
“It’s directly linked with that reactionary constitution that we have that doesn’t even recognize cities as a legal entity. We’re completely dependent in cities on property tax and a few gifts from the provincial government. Until this is changed fundamentally, we’re going to always be screwed.”
After most of the buildings on Overdale were demolished in 1989, the project was cancelled and the site remained vacant until construction began on the YUL condo project in 2015.
Today, Milton Park’s greystone row houses, duplexes and triplexes lend a rare note of continuity in an ever-changing city.
The young radicals who founded the community are now seniors, quietly enjoying urban life at its best. They have long since made their peace with La Cité — shopping in the mall, working out in the health club and seeing movies at Cinéma du Parc.
The co-operative vision has spread across the province, with about 60,000 Quebecers now living in 30,000 units administered by 1,300 co-ops, according to the Confédération québécoise des coopératives d’habitation.
Kowaluk was named to the Order of Canada in 2013 and Order of Quebec in 2015 for her efforts on behalf of low-income and marginalized people over five decades.
Milton Park was featured on a Canadian stamp in 1998 and nominated as a finalist in Habitat for Humanity’s World Habitat Awards in 2013.
But community members have not rested on their laurels.
“Even though we won the Milton Park Project, people in the community didn’t stop fighting,” says Roussopoulos, standing on a patch of land near the Park-Pine interchange, which became a more pedestrian-friendly intersection in 2006 with input from Milton Park residents.
“For example, right here, on this green space, some developer was going to build a 14-storey building. We stopped it,” he says.
Kowaluk and other Milton Park members also transformed the former Strathearn School into a community arts centre.
In 1996, Kowaluk, Roussopoulos and others founded the Urban Ecology Centre, which fosters sustainable cities by encouraging urban agriculture, citizen participation and active transportation. It is the sponsor of Jane’s Walk. The community has also spearheaded efforts to convert the former Hôtel-Dieu hospital into affordable housing and a community health centre.
“We have put together a coalition of 30 community housing organizations and want to have a major project there,” Roussopoulos says.
“And what is also interesting is that there’s a new generation of activists. They want to continue. They want the message to go from one generation to the other. That’s very encouraging.”