I grew up in an HLM.
Every Friday, my little brother and I would join our father in his townhouse on Habitat Street. He was sick and had little income, hence our place in low-income housing. I am not specifying it so that our situation seems more noble to you. There is no better reason than another when it comes to having the right to afford a roof over your head. I simply underline it so that you know that despite the little jojo context, these weekends in HLM are among the most beautiful of my life…
Our small private courtyard opened onto a common lot bordered by a river. My brother sometimes pitched his tent there for an outdoor adventure. (Un)fortunately, a long fence prevented us from soaking in the highly polluted water.
Behind our accommodation, a park enclosed between four residential buildings. It was there that I wrote my first novel – combining espionage, love and political intrigue – at the age of 13. The ten-page story has never been published, but note that its only reader (my neighbor Maxime) found it “still good”.
What touches me the most, when I think back to those years, is that my friends were constantly at our house. I might have been embarrassed to show them our little kingdom built on poverty (especially since they came from rather wealthy families), but I don’t think I’ve ever felt the slightest shame. The truth is that they felt good there and so did I.
It wasn’t the finery that made our home comfortable, it was the world inside. Love impregnated even in the walls.
Quite frankly, I knew that we lived there because we would never have the means to live elsewhere, but I did not guess the weight of precariousness. I felt like I was growing up in a tightly knit mini-village. A village whose resilience breaks my heart today.
How many parents, rue Habitat, wondering how to meet the needs of their little ones? How many isolated seniors? Of people who had strayed from a path that might have been the right one? Of people we had collectively pushed out of the way that could have been the right one?
My HLM allowed me to go very early to meet the poqués.
There were children who came to play on the edge of the fence to avoid their alcoholic father or to find a bit of innocence in a daily life that was certainly not full of it. Even when very young, there were tired faces. I quickly understood that not everyone starts from the same place in life. Since death was hovering in vain, at home, we were among the pampered…
In our HLM, there was solidarity.
Our old neighbor shoveled our driveway when insomnia took hold of him. I sometimes babysat the children of the single mother who needed a break, opposite. Every summer, a community worker organized a party for local youth. Thanks to her, I learned how to make papier-mâché pinatas and manage a cheering crowd.
You will tell me that all that exists, no matter the neighborhood. Probably. But I have the impression that the cohesion is different when it is done from injury to injury. We were all fallible. We knew that having each other was a chance.
I left rue Habitat at the age of 16, when my father was leaving this land. I went back there for the first time, last summer… The place seemed damaged to me. Much more than I remember.
I don’t know if it’s because my child’s eyes failed to notice the falling shingle or if it’s because the place really deteriorated, but one thing is certain: the love that we had injected into the walls was not enough to keep them worthy.
Then this week I learned in my Press that1 : “More than 40% of the 65,000 low-cost housing units in the province are rated D or E, that is to say that they need major work”, according to the Federation of tenants of low-income housing du Québec and the Residents’ Advisory Committee of the Office municipal d’habitation de Montréal.
In this article by Isabelle Ducas, I also learned that: “As more and more housing becomes uninhabitable in aging HLMs, the government funding allocated to their renovation continues to decline: it has gone from an average annual from 352 million between 2015 and 2019, to 281 million per year between 2019 and 2022, according to the FLHLMQ. »
Without making a direct link between my memories and the recent state of the HLM which saw me grow up, I immediately felt the need to recall how important these environments are.
Of course, they don’t only hide lives as sweet as mine. I know that poverty is a factor that can contribute to many inequalities, violence and excesses… But I also know that many HLM tenants benefit from the resources offered by qualified community workers and from an entourage who understands their reality a little better. , by dint of sharing bits and pieces of it.
Beyond the right to housing that they provide, HLMs are places that can create networks to rely on when you feel like the world has let you down.
Or that yours is about to collapse.
(On that, I know what I’m talking about.)
It would be the least of the things that one grants them the deserved care.