The Fence at Milton-Parc
The Fence at Milton-Parc
For years, a vacant lot has laid bare Montreal's homelessness crisis, pitting neighbours, the unhoused and land developers against each other as people continue to die and suffer in the streets.
By Eve Cable
“I’m a singer, too. I like to make people laugh.”
Bobby pulls his legs in as people rush by. We’re huddled together in a tiny sheltered enclave, sharing a pack of cigarettes. Bobby’s friends sit together in pairs along Parc Ave, mostly near the intersection of Milton St. They used to sit as one big group at the empty parking lot on the intersection, but we’re watching contractors bolt a six-foot tall metal fence around the lot for the third time in as many weeks.
The developers who own the lot first erected the fence in summer 2020 - they’re a company called Goldmanco Inc, and they’re property developers based in Toronto. They’ve never spoken to the unhoused people that live at the intersection, nor have they made contact with any community organisations that do street work in the area. But everytime someone brings the fence down, they’ve hired contractors to put it back up in under a day.
“This can’t stop us being us,” Bobby says, “But it is making it harder.”
The intersection of Milton and Parc has been a hotspot for local unhoused communities since the Open Door moved into the basement of Notre Dame de la Salette church in 2018. The organization had previously worked with unhoused Inuit people living in Cabot Square, and when they moved to Milton-Parc, some of the clients who used its services followed.
As one of the few ‘wet’ shelters in the city, the Open Door is a crucial resource for unhoused people coping with addiction, allowing its clientele to receive services while under the influence of alcohol and other substances. At the end of the day, it’s a lifeline for unhoused people in Milton-Parc.
There has been hostility to clientele of the Open Door since before the shelter was even established in the area. When it was announced that the organisation would be moving in 2018, a small but vocal group of Milton-Parc residents launched a petition, citing concerns around impacts on the local housing market and an increase in drug deals and crime. The 40 individuals and organisations who signed the petition remain vocal about the situation in Milton-Parc. From time to time, they’ll post photographs of unhoused people sleeping next to bottles of alcohol across public Facebook groups. They’re the same people who, at the height of the pandemic, launched another campaign to seal the empty parking lot from public use in 2020. Their email petitions reached Goldmanco Inc, who responded to their calls by installing the fence.
Sophie Hart got involved with the community in Milton-Parc as a street worker in October of 2020. “It was a ghost town,” she tells me “I was like, ‘Where do you go if you’re told to stay home but you don’t have a home?’” The fence, which had been erected a few months prior, was a permanent part of Hart’s work, and a constant reminder of the physical barriers communities face in mutual aid projects. Pushing unhoused Inuit into the road had an extreme effect on the ability to engage in mutual aid projects. “It affected the work of other projects, like the Indigenous Support Workers Project, who used that space to meet with community members, share food and spend time together. It was once the gathering place of the community. They would clean it up after each get together. I’ve heard from others it’s been a real loss to community programming because there really is no other space as accessible in the community.”
The problems related to the fence started during the pandemic - before that, the parking lot was wide open, and unhoused people would hang out together throughout the day and night. They’re an intergenerational population, and having the ability to socialize in a large group was important for those living on the intersection, as streetworkers in the area have repeatedly told me.
The space was completely unused, and a stone’s throw away from the Open Door - the parking lot was the most convenient and accessible place for the unhoused communities in Milton-Parc to reside, and it wasn’t being used by anyone else, so it made sense for people to congregate there.
But, when COVID really hit Montreal in 2020, most of the city’s shelters either dramatically reduced their capacities or temporarily shut down, fighting off brutal outbreaks of the virus. The Open Door managed to stay open during the daytime when other shelters weren’t, meaning that unhoused people from across the city found themselves seeking shelter in Milton-Parc, beyond the Open Door’s capacity.
“At the time, the Open Door was closed on evenings and weekends,” Hart said. “Services were strapped for staff, finances and functioning at reduced capacities. It was like living in crisis mode for two years, just waiting for the next emergency to happen.”
“It hurts to see people who are struggling pass away. And to see nothing change.”
-Bobby, Milton-Parc resident.
And so, when COVID was tearing through local homeless shelters and disproportionately affecting unhoused people in our city, a small group of neighbours decided to lobby for the fence. When other community members repeatedly tore the fence down, the property development company responsible for the land reinforced the structure, expanding it further into the sidewalk.
“The issues escalated,” Hart tells me. “The second fence was put up in the summer of 2021. This left no room for community members to exist and forced them onto the sidewalks and storefronts. This was really scary. I worried about increased issues with unsupportive community members, increased safety concerns and less space for people to live.”
Elie Gill has been working with the Citizens Committee of Milton Parc, and shares that sentiment that community outreach sometimes feels like an uphill climb when small organisations lack the resources needed to help everyone in need.
“All we can give them right now is spaghetti and a bottle of water. It’s so inadequate.” says Gill, a community worker in the neighbourhood. One of her biggest concerns for the government and for local community members unhappy with unhoused neighbours is a question of where they’re meant to go.
“It’s really impractical to expect that they will take up absolutely no public space,” Gill says. “I think that’s a really inhuman expectation to have. You can’t expect people to just not be homeless in public anymore. That’s preposterous to expect for one. And for two, it’s an absurd lack of compassion. If you want the homeless problem to be solved, a lot hinders on how you construe that problem.”
“Almost organically” Gill says, the empty lot became a community space. It became an area where people could sleep for more than one day at a time, and where they could go and reliably see familiar faces every day. It isn’t safe — the lot is still right next to an extremely busy road — but it was safer than other areas in Milton-Parc that edged unhoused people dangerously close to oncoming traffic. When the lot is closed, people have no choice but to sit directly on the sidewalk. Bobby explains that this is life or death for people at the intersection: “People get accidentally killed. It occurs once in a while, but once in a while is too much. Once is too much.” Gill agrees, she tells me that this is one of Montreal’s busiest intersections, and that traffic comes through dangerously fast. “It’s deeply unsafe,” she says.
I ask Bobby what the first thing he thought was when he saw the fence. “Napa and Kitty.” he says.
Raphael “Napa” André and Kitty Kakkinerk are two unhoused Indigenous people who died in the Milton-Parc area in the last two years. Napa died in a portable washroom opposite the empty lot, and Kitty was hit by a car on Parc as she ran from her abusive ex. Bobby believes if the fence hadn’t been up, she would have ran into the lot, and not into the busy street.
“It hurts to see people who are struggling pass away,” Bobby says. “And to see nothing change. When these things happen, it affects every one of us. It could have been any one of us that day. It is one of us. It was.”
A couple days later, I’m a few blocks from my apartment, back in Milton-Parc. The chainlink fence has been clipped away, some of my unhoused neighbours telling me that they saw people come at night in masks and tear down some of the wire.
“I want to say thank you to all the Montrealers and the Canadians that are trying to put down this fence,” Bobby says with a smile. His girlfriend Ann interrupts: “It’ll be up again tomorrow.” Less than 24 hours later, I’m watching the same contractors whose faces I’ve come to know re-erect the fence. I ask them if they know anything about the people that used to occupy the empty lot.
“No,” they reply. “We just work here.”
Pierre Parent is a local streetworker with the Indigenous Street Workers Project, helping out unhoused people in the city. He’s watched the fence go up and come down time and time again. Our neighbours are getting tired, he tells me: “We’re resilient, you know, we get up, but it just makes it harder. Just makes it more stressful. Just makes it more desperate.”
Parent emphasises that unhoused Indigenous people shouldn’t have to be resilient, and should receive the government aid they’re entitled to, including adequate support at ‘wet shelters’, which are shelters authorized to help clientele who are under the influence of drugs and alcohol, like the Open Door.
“Amidst not knowing if they have a spot to stay, or getting their tent ripped away in Milton-Parc, they also have the daily realities of having to sustain their addiction without getting sick, or sustain avoiding the police, sustain dealing with the trauma that’s in their heads too.”
“I really can’t imagine any benefits to the fence, everything that was happening before the fence is still happening, just now directly on the sidewalk.”
-Sophie Hart, street worker.
The fence is an ongoing reminder that to many people in our country, Indigenous peoples’ safety isn’t consequential. “It’s another failure of the city and the province to protect citizen’s safety,” Hart says. “I really can’t imagine any benefits to the fence, everything that was happening before the fence is still happening, just now directly on the sidewalk.”
As Bobby and I look across the street, the workers make progress on the fence. Bobby says it’s humiliating, but not a foreign experience.
“It’s been thousands of years we’ve been on this land,” he says. “And they always take it away. The whole world is for everyone. It’s not just for government.”
Pierre agrees, telling me that this is another way that settlers in Canada have failed to protect Indigenous land rights: “They already put us on this small stamp of land, and they want to narrow it down some more. This is what’s always been going on, whether it's urban, whether it’s in the city, whether it’s on the reserve.”
Goldmanco Inc. is a family-owned property development company. The company, working mostly out of Ontario, doesn’t have a functioning website, and though I’ve become familiar with the receptionist that answers the phone number available on Google, there’s nobody to contact that can provide me with any updates or information regarding the company’s construction of the fence.
I’ve been given the information of two different people, Kimberly Opassinis and Zach Wood, the Commercial Property Manager and Leasing Representative respectively. Wood’s LinkedIn interests include ‘Civil Rights and Social Action’, ‘Environment’, ‘Health’ and ‘Human Rights’.
Though I’ve sent both individuals extensive information about the danger our unhoused neighbours say they’re in as a result of Goldmanco’s fence, I’ve never received a reply - and neither has Hart.
“We had a long process of trying to make contact with them. We sent letters, emails, calls to no avail. We did petitions, and public call-ins, but nothing.” Hart tells me. “In the fall of 2020 we offered Goldmanco a monthly honorarium if they would remove the fence and allow us to use that space. They never replied to my many emails, calls, or LinkedIn messages.”
Multiple local organisers tell me the circumstances, that the city put in a first right of refusal, meaning that if the lot is being sold, the city has the first chance to purchase the land. Sources have explained the situation to me - the lot isn’t worth much by the municipal government’s reckoning, around $4 million, but Goldmanco Inc. has valued the plot as what it would be worth when they’re done developing, somewhere more in the realm of $14 million.
So, why has Goldmanco failed to develop the land for so long, and will they develop it any time soon? Though I’ve been asking the company about their plans for development, I’m continuously met with silence. I began asking around, seeing if any of our neighbours or community organisers have heard anything about progress on the land. A few have heard rumours of a new pharmacy - despite two pharmacies already located in a two block radius - and everyone’s expecting new-build condos.
“But it’s not zoned for that,” a source explains. “So they’re just waiting it out. They’re just holding onto it from what I’ve heard, and waiting out a change in the law. And they’re a corporation, so they can afford to do so.”
With Golmanco keeping the lot undeveloped but not selling it to the city, there isn’t a clear path to reaching a final decision on the fence at Milton and Parc. Community organizers don’t show any sign of stopping their fight to keep the fence down, with parts of the fence clipped away virtually every night.
At the same time, Goldmanco’s contractors seem to be sent out almost immediately for repairs. For community organisers, there is only one feasible option: reappropriation of the land.
“Our future begins in our imagination and with starting to put together the pieces to make it happen. The future I see in Milton-Parc is an Indigeous-led community health centre, social services liaisons and supportive and independent living projects,” Hart says.
She believes this is only possible with the fiscal support of federal and local government services.
“The issue at the end of the day is financing, there is a will to solve these issues. Once the city, province and federal governments decide that Milton-Parc is “worth it” and invest in Indigenous-led projects to meet the community where they are at in a long term health and housing project, I think change will begin then.”
Bobby and his neighbours share the vision, dreaming of a community space on the lot. He tells me he wants it to be a three story building, with housing for Inuit up top, an art-making space for soapstone carving in the middle, and a bustling restaurant selling Inuit delicacies on the ground floor. Ann, he says, is the best at baking bannock, and she could serve it there - she’s embarrassed and smiles back.
“One day, maybe.” she says, and we keep looking at the fence.
Postscript: A few weeks after our interview, Bobby was hit by a car and pinned under the vehicle for 12 minutes. The impact broke his arm and several fingers but he’s in good spirits and recovering.
About the author…
Goldmanco‘s desire to protect their building is understandable, but to fence off an entire parking lot that nobody is using is living proof that colonialism is alive and well in Canada.
You have a point, until the city, federal and provincial governments truly care, and realize homeless people matter nothing will be done. Sad but true.