The Ensemble Montréal opposition party says the city is pushing people into the street. “It shows a total lack of leadership.”
On a scorching day this week, as she walked out of the Jardins Gordon building in Verdun, Diane said she will shed no tears for the place she called home for the last two months.
“This is the last place you want to go,” the 74-year-old woman said while standing on the tree-lined residential street. “The people staying here have been rejected by every shelter. They’re all druggies.
“The food is the worst: they give you either a box of noodles that are cooked, or you get noodles in a cup you can add water to, or they’ll give you a sandwich that is past its expiry date.”
The city’s opposition party has decried a lack of planning by the Plante administration.
“They have known about this for a long time,” Ensemble Montréal leader Aref Salem said in an interview Tuesday. “It shows a total lack of leadership, a lack of co-ordination and a lack of vision.”
He said the city has abandoned those living on the streets by not providing a building to replace the Verdun shelter.
“The city is pushing people out into the street.”
Many who were living in the Verdun shelter over the last few months now have nowhere to go. Only about 18 people were still living there as of Monday, according to those who spoke to a reporter. A tent had been set up on the embankment next to the bicycle path that runs along the canal between de la Vérendrye and Champlain Blvds. A man smoking on the shelter’s back terrasse said he plans to live in a tent in a friend’s backyard until he finds a new shelter.
Diane has been living on the streets for the last two years, ever since she and her husband were bilked out of $425,000 of their life savings by a scammer. The couple were bumped around to shelters throughout the city until they landed in Verdun.
“I didn’t know anything about shelters; I didn’t know they existed,” she said. “For the first two months, my husband and I slept at McDonald’s.”
On Thursday she plans to move to a rental condo someone has left to her, at a cost of $1,400 per month. She has arranged through a social worker to receive government aid and her pension to be mailed to her new address in order to pay for her home.
“I can’t wait,” she said. “I’m counting down the days until Thursday.”
Another person walking out of the shelter said he was able to find an apartment for $400 per month in Ville Émard. He signed for it sight unseen.
“I’ll be happy on Aug. 1 when I see it,” he said.
In a statement, Robert Beaudry, the Plante administration’s point person for homelessness, said the city is in discussions with the Société de développement social (SDS), which runs the Verdun shelter, and the province’s Health Ministry to find a permanent building in the area that would offer similar services.
He added that the SDS has been co-ordinating work to relocate those who were staying in the shelter to other places, or to other community organizations.