Real Estate | Plateau from nowhere

Do you remember when Matricule 728 gave a solid armbar to a poor musician who hadn’t asked for anything just a few months after generously peppering students in 2012? Filmed without her knowledge (once again), she had brought out her gall in a funny way: “The guitarists, the red square osties, the shit-eating artists, the Plateaunians of the now… »

That expression surprised me enough that I never forgot it. Despite everything, there was a bit of poetry inside this brutal being.

“Plateau of nowhere », that’s how I feel going to live in the Plateau Mont-Royal, since my boyfriend inherited the house from his parents. I have spent my whole life in the same sector of the Centre-Sud district, it doesn’t take much for me to feel in exile.

A dog in the bowling game of the famous “Clique du Plateau”? No kidding, the daughter of bottom of the coast feels like betraying his hood that she never wanted to leave. But maybe it’s my lover’s turn to tell me about his neighborhood where he lived the first 24 years of his life. We’ve been together for 24 years and I’ve been bugging him with my childhood memories of the Centre-Sud on all our walks. It’s now up to me to listen to him and, after only a few weeks, I already have the impression that he is rambling. I must have been a real pain during his quarter-century stay down the coast.

Just as important as having a roof, there is the neighborhood where you live. The geographical (and social) location plays squarely on the value of a house. This is perhaps what angers me the most in the phenomenon of renovictions: not only are people thrown out on the street, but they are uprooted when they can no longer find accommodation where they have lived all their lives. It’s incredibly violent.

There’s a difference between those who settle in a neighborhood because they really like it and those who just pass cash above. Which is very well explained in the essay Gentrivilleby Marie Sterlin and Antoine Trussard, which I am currently reading, in my frenzy of real estate readings, with The habit of ruinsby Marie-Hélène Voyer, and To have and to be had, by Eula Biss. My specialty being to find the right books for the right situations, these three titles have become bedside books.

The lover and I, we walk the dog in the alleys of the Plateau feeling a little bourges and imposters. We spend our time looking to see if there are houses crooked than ours, just to reassure ourselves, and there are still quite a few left in this corner of Montreal, gutted in places by construction and demolitions.

The Plateau remains in the top of the coolest neighborhoods in Montreal, but it is less and less accessible. This is not where I would have looked for an apartment if I had to move. But when I was 20, it was Ze place to be.

Everything that was fun in Montreal was there and all my friends lived there in shared flats in big, inexpensive apartments. But can a neighborhood stay cool if the people who made it cool can’t live there anymore? This is what I will check in the next few years.

I may be leaving at a time when my Center-South is about to change as it has not done for a long time. The closing of the Archambault store has brought back into the news the fact that the Place Émilie-Gamelin area is a seedy place. Nothing new. I have always read in the newspapers that my neighborhood is one of the worst holes in Montreal and I often find that we exaggerate. When you have lived there all your life, you are used to this fauna. Even we love it. Children who grew up in Centre-Sud, Hochelaga or Montréal-Nord have no choice but to develop what is known in English as “street smart”. And there aren’t many places in Montreal where I could chat with an old neighbor who was having her coffee at the convenience store in her dressing gown.

I had darker times, in the late 1980s, when injection drugs and shootings came like a cluster bomb, leading to a surge in street prostitution in the area. There were syringes everywhere, people were banging overdoses in the parks. Today there are fewer needles, thanks to essential organizations like Spectre de rue, but it is also because opioid pills have become popular, with so many overdoses.

When I was 15, every morning when I was waiting for the bus to go to secondary school, men in the car would ask me for a blowjob, and when I came back from my student job in the evening, I took the rue Sainte- Catherine, because I could always walk into a gay bar without danger when a predator was following me. The Gay Village has always been a safe spacedespite the problems in the sector.

I admit that I sometimes wonder how the tourists who arrive from the airport by bus at night feel in that area. If this is the first image they have of Montreal, some must doubt the choice of their travel destination.

But for many local regulars, the homeless people of Place Émilie-Gamelin are perhaps the last bulwark against gentrification.

I have no illusions, with all the transformations to come in this sector, we are going to build condos, and we are going to squeeze them, the poor and the homeless. It’s too well located, near the Jacques-Cartier bridge, downtown and the Berri-UQAM metro which goes in all directions. We guess in advance what will be built in this block of abandoned buildings in front of the station and, knowing my neighborhood, I know that there will be resistance. It’s in his DNA.

The days of wildlife in Place Émilie-Gamelin are numbered in this sector, like when the Faubourg à m’lasse was destroyed to build Radio-Canada. I laughed a lot when I saw all the noise they made with the closure of the old tower. My mother, who lived with her grandmothers in rooming houses, lost her home when the Faubourg was razed to the ground. Was the construction of the new Radio-Canada house a harbinger?

This little weekly series on the Usher house is coming to an end. Many of you wrote to me every Saturday to tell me that you liked this meeting, that you wanted it to continue, but I received my first email from a lady who finds that it is starting to take a long time to one house. She’s not wrong and I had already planned to quit after the move. It will be done when you read the next column, which will be the conclusion – in the newspaper, at least, because I believe that in fact, we are only at the beginning of the adventure and our surprises. Especially me, who is living my first migration to another neighborhood. And I want to sign: “your devoted Plateaunian from nowhere “.