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 dwelling that we are describing, and where a family lives, does not belong to a private owner who is negligent or overwhelmed by the scale of the work to be done. It belongs to the City of Montreal. More precisely, to the Office municipal d’habitation de Montréal (OMHM).
We are at Habitations Marie-Victorin, a social housing complex in Rivière-des-Prairies that has 200 housing units for families and seniors. Here, apartments are “unsanitary” and full of 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,” Ms. Galan said.
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 perceptible 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 doesn’t work. The washing machine leaks. The ceiling on the ground floor is cracked just below. “I just hope I can keep doing my laundry without the washing machine falling down,” the tenant says.
A few doors away, at Simone Étienne’s house, the paint came off the walls like they were rubber tabs when she repainted. “I’ve tried several times, but it never sticks. 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.
While people live in these conditions, 18 four- and five-bedroom maisonettes 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 domino game to rehouse them. “We have been meeting with them for years about this. We have even seen architects and designers who have shown us brick colours,” jokes the Phare 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 says she has since 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.
Regarding the dilapidated state of the housing, denounced by residents to La Presse, Mr. Vachon states 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 forwarded 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 can 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, she has only thought about leaving, preferably in an HLM somewhere other than Rivière-des-Prairies. “I was traumatized. We’re all scared here,” she illustrates.
She had hopes that it would work out 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.