“Everyone is sick”

In the apartment, there are dozens of holes in the walls and doors. The cupboard doors are torn off. There is also some missing on the kitchen cabinets. The walls are blackened. Part of the bathroom ceiling, which fell in large sections of drywall six months ago, was replaced by a trash bag stuck with adhesive tape.

“We’re afraid to wash,” says the tenant, Dacnelle Charles.

This accommodation that we describe, and where a family lives, does not belong to a negligent private owner or overwhelmed by the extent of the work to be done. It belongs to the City of Montreal. More precisely, at the Office municipal d’habitation de Montréal (OMHM).

We are at Habitations Marie-Victorin, an HLM complex in Rivière-des-Prairies which has 200 housing units for families and seniors. Here, apartments are “unsanitary” and filled with mold and vermin, deplores the director of the community organization Le Phare, Yanick Galan, whose offices are located in the heart of the real estate complex.

Bedbug and cockroach infestations are such that Le Phare has removed all fabric furniture. Insects were embedded there during visits by neighborhood residents.

“Everyone is sick,” said M^me Galan.

Marie Milouse and her five children occupy a four-bedroom cottage, but her youngest daughter, aged 6, sleeps with her rather than in her own room. “She has a nosebleed. It is always congested. In her room, the air is not good,” laments the mother, adding that she leaves the windows open all year round. The smell of damp is noticeable everywhere upstairs.

Recently, a fire broke out in the neighboring semi-detached house. The flames entered the Milouse family home and licked the entrance wall. We can still see the traces of it. “We went out the back patio door. Luckily it wasn’t winter because the door and window were freezing. We would have been stuck. »

In the kitchen, the hood does not work. The washer is leaking. The ground floor ceiling is cracked just below. “I just hope I can continue to do my laundry without the washer falling downstairs,” said the tenant.

A few doors away, at Simone Étienne’s house, the paint came off the walls as if they were rubber tabs when she repainted. “I’ve tried several times, but it never works. There is too much humidity,” she believes. Her son often has nosebleeds. Her two youngest daughters needed pumps to clear their bronchial tubes. She thinks it has to do with the house.

For Douadine Valentin, also a mother of five children, it is the treatments against bedbugs and cockroaches that cause her the most suffering. With her asthma, the products that an exterminator comes to spread almost every two weeks, she testifies, make it very difficult for her to breathe. And there is the painful task of putting all the family’s possessions into bags each time.

Houses empty for nine years

While people live in these conditions, 18 four- and five-bedroom cottages in the same complex have been vacant and boarded up since 2015. At the time, tenants had to be relocated “due to fungal contamination in the buildings,” explains the OMHM spokesperson, Mathieu Vachon.

In nine years, residents of the complex say they have already been promised the start of major work, which would have allowed a game of dominoes to rehouse them. “We’ve been meeting them for this for years. We even saw architects and designers who showed us brick colors,” quips the Lighthouse coordinator, Julie Geoffroy.

“When you go to visit Habitations Marie-Victorin, it’s something you don’t forget,” says the mayor of the Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles district, Caroline Bourgeois, who visited the places for the first time during the electoral campaign. She has since said that she has intervened “personally” on several occasions in the matter with the OMHM and the deputies responsible on the issue of barricaded units.

But the work is still pending and the houses remain empty.

It was only the budget for the new Low-Rent Housing Renovation Program, launched in 2023 by the Société d’habitation du Québec, which unblocked things, says Mr. Vachon.

According to the OMHM, the first phase of work is planned for 2025 with the rehabilitation of 25 houses, including the 18 currently barricaded. A second phase will follow. “We prepare the plans and specifications,” maintains Mathieu Vachon.

On the subject of the dilapidated housing, denounced by residents at The Press, Mr. Vachon affirms that the OMHM was only made aware of certain problems during a meeting on another subject held on May 15 with the tenants. “The next day, the requests were sent to the various departments concerned and they are being processed. It turns out that most of these requests had not been forwarded before,” he says.

As for the hole in the ceiling of Dacnelle Charles’s bathroom, it was reported to the Office in November when there was a water leak from the neighbor upstairs. A repair was planned for February, but the workers reportedly came up against a closed door. They closed the file rather than making another appointment, which should have been done. “The repair will be done soon,” assures Mathieu Vachon.

Mr. Vachon adds that the office is an owner “very present in living environments”. “Despite all the good will of the organization to fulfill its mission, we are not immune to situations where, unfortunately, shortcomings may occur. »

Despite the terrible state of her accommodation, it is the feeling of insecurity that pushes Dacnelle Charles to want to leave. In 2021, his apartment was riddled with bullets. She was inside. Since then, all she can think about is moving away, preferably to an HLM somewhere other than Rivière-des-Prairies. “I was traumatized. We are all afraid here,” she illustrates.

She had hopes that it would work a few times, but the move ultimately didn’t happen. In the meantime, the OMHM has still not replaced the railing of its balcony, where six bullet holes are still clearly visible.

“They’re not going to move someone because they got shot.” We would have to move everyone,” says Julie Geoffroy, from Le Phare.