As the reported yesterday our colleague Olivier Faucher“Montreal firefighters had to urgently evacuate the tenants of a block of 30 apartments that posed risks of fire and subsidence in the borough of Plateau-Mont-Royal”.
The story, in fact, is one, too classic in Montreal, of combined negligence by the owners and the City. Living in the same neighborhood, like other neighbors, we saw the declining state of this building.
On Roy Street, nestled between St-André and St-Hubert, even the sidewalk that runs along the building was regularly flooded with water. It is to say.
As reported The newspaper, “this is not the first time that the Montreal Fire Department has had to intervene at this location for water backflows. Inspectors have been there three times over the past few months.
Forgotten Eternals
We will surely be provided with scholarly “explanations” for this and that. However, the important thing here is that these are typical small apartments, whose tenants are often on low incomes, without insurance and with little or no social support.
These eternally forgotten public authorities and some landlords meanwhile millionaires, here they are now more urgently evacuated in the midst of a major shortage of affordable housing. And this, on the very eve of the first snowfall of winter.
Quoted in the article, one of the victims said in effect this: “the City does nothing. There is a dispute between the two owners. The couple [de propriétaires] and the City toss the ball to each other.” What a surprise…
Behind the sea of construction sites deployed across the city, this sad culture of neglect, we can still see it in the lamentable state of certain uneven, cracked and poorly lit streets and sidewalks. Which, in winter, turn into dangerous icy falling machines.
This same culture is unfortunately far from being limited to a single borough, a single building or a single sidewalk…
This week, the victims of rue Roy are the victims, but they will surely not be the last.