“My rent was paid; I didn’t do anything wrong,” says Lorie Martin, 50. A community worker could only offer her a tent and a sleeping bag.
Fifty-year-old Lorie Martin wrote to tell me she’s been couch surfing ever since a fire forced her out of her LaSalle studio apartment five weeks ago. When she refused to stay at a shelter, a local community worker could only offer her a tent and a sleeping bag.
A recovering cocaine addict who stopped using 23 years ago, Martin, who suffers from clinical depression, gets by on her disability cheques after a warehouse accident left her chronically ill and unable to work.
Martin’s daughter, a recovering heroin addict, passed away in 2022 at the age of 32 from bacterial pneumonia with sepsis. Her daughter’s partner passed away in 2019 from carfentanil, a powerful opioid. Martin’s mom passed away in 2021 from lung cancer.
“The last two years have really smacked me in my face,” she says. “Every day I wake up and think, ‘How did this happen to me?’”
On Oct. 14 at 4 a.m., Martin woke up to black smoke, unable to breathe.
“The first thing I did was grab my mom’s and daughter’s urns and call 911,” she says.
The fire department determined the blaze was due to faulty wiring in an old heating system.
Martin says she opened a claim with the rental board last year to try to force her landlord to fix heaters that occasionally smoked and even once caught on fire.
With no home insurance, Martin is staying with a friend this week. “After that, I don’t know where I’m going.”
She has looked at 27 apartments this month. The last one was “the size of a closet.” Rent was $1,000. She paid $550 for her studio apartment. “I ate in my bedroom and slept in my kitchen,” she says, “but it was fine for me.”
As a recovering addict, Martin doesn’t want to go to a shelter, where she might be around people using. “I’m worried about relapsing,” she says.
“The answer to everything is: ‘Go to a shelter or a crisis centre,’” Martin says. “My rent was paid; I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“The housing situation is very bad,” he says. “We don’t have places for people to go, so it’s not unheard of. We’d rather someone at least have something over their heads.”
Varvaris cites living costs and lack of funding as the main culprits. “Winter is coming, and we’ll do everything we can to avoid people sleeping outside, but ‘everything we can’ is not infinite.”
“I don’t know how people survive in these encampments,” says Martin. “I’d be afraid.”
“Imagine: community groups are handing out tents for survival and the city is then dismantling” the camps where they’re set up, Sauvé says. “It’s a Kafkaesque circle. We must act by housing people now. Even if it means taking risks and thinking outside the box.”
Varvaris acknowledges mental health and consumption issues often lead to homelessness, but says the number of people out there now because of unfortunate financial situations and the cost of living is increasing.
“These people would have been your neighbour a month ago,” he says. “They were evicted because their landlord wanted to raise the rent, and they can’t find another place because everywhere they look it’s $500 more than what they were paying before.”
Toula Drimonis is a Montreal journalist and the author of We, the Others: Allophones, Immigrants, and Belonging in Canada.