In a disturbing development that has gotten tongues wagging, Montreal’s historical LGBTQ neighbourhood, the Village has become the venue of homelessness, addition and crime.
Some residents believe that the Village’s social problems are being imported because of the district’s history of being an inclusive space for marginalized people.
Speaking with newsmen, Richard Fitzgerald, who has lived in the Village for 46 years, said he has witnessed a slow decline.
He said “Twenty years ago it was a really lively place and it was known around the world.” According to him, now, “you come here at night and it’s scary. There’s violence. There’s a whole problem of people who have drug problems, mental health problems.”
As part of ways to curb the issues, the city has boosted police presence in the neighbourhood just east of downtown and assigned a two-person psychosocial intervention team to direct vulnerable people to resources. Recall that in June, it released a plan to revitalize the neighbourhood and deal with homelessness and mental health.
However, locals said the measures are insufficient, and they lament that the municipal government helped create the problem by concentrating services for vulnerable people into one area without the necessary investments to properly care for them.
“They don’t have anywhere to go,” Fitzgerald said, sympathizing with people struggling with drug and mental health problems, whom he called “victims of a system.”
He added that “This is where they come, and the city encourages it because they try to say this is an inclusive area. I think the mentality is that the gay community is more open to marginality than the rest of the city.”
In a strategic move, Christian Généreux recently co-organized a march through the Village streets in an effort to get the municipal, provincial and federal governments to address the district’s social ills.
In his words, his neighbourhood’s problems have been partly “imposed” on it. He pointed to the city’s decision during the COVID-19 pandemic to temporarily convert a large hotel in the area into a homeless shelter. “It imported to the Village problems that are not specific to the Village,” Généreux said.
He continued that “All this combination of factors makes it so all of this is grouped in one neighbourhood, and it creates pressure, a lack of security, and as the governments don’t provide the resources needed, these people find themselves in the streets with the problems they have.”
Bruno Laprade, a spokesperson for an LGBTQ organization and local historian who has been giving tours of the neighbourhood for 17 years, said the Village has long been a hub for community organizations and services for marginalized people. Commercial vacancies following the deindustrialization of the area in the 20th century meant non-profits and other groups could take advantage of lower rents, he explained.
According to him, the Village’s problems have been compounded by a drop in tourism due to competition from LGBTQ destinations in other cities and even from other commercial areas of Montreal.
Speaking further, Laprade said in the late 1990s and early 2000s, another scheme to revitalize the area that focused on attracting tourists eventually led the city to create a summer car-free zone on the strip of Ste-Catherine Street that runs through the Village, one of the first such programs in the city. Now, popular annual car-free zones in other parts of the city are drawing crowds, too.
It was stated that Montreal’s latest plan to bring people back to the Village includes an effort to redefine the neighbourhood’s identity, with public art and memorials dedicated to the LGBTQ community, more extensive summer and winter programming, and the refurbishment of Ste-Catherine Street.
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