Excellent story about life on the streets published in a large english daily
MONTREAL – Jim McHugh didn't see them coming. Three undercover police officers dressed like skaters rushed into the glass kiosk that serves as an entrance to Atwater métro station in Cabot Square and caught him red-handed with a lit cigarette in his hand.
Now one of the officers is hunched over his ticket pad next to the escalator handrail, asking McHugh for his name, address and postal code.
One of the other officers paces back and forth like he's waiting for somebody. The third officer looks over at McHugh's girlfriend, Annie Etok, who stares blankly ahead near a doorway where there's a faint odour of excrement.
The métro police leave, and McHugh tucks the $75 ticket away inside his baseball jacket. Then he pulls out another cigarette and lights up.
McHugh has lost count of the number of tickets he and Etok have gotten for smoking or jumping the gate inside the métro system. He figures the fines come to over $3,000, none of them paid. That's life when you're on the street.
"Well, I'm going to know these f---ing guys if they come back," he says of the officers. "I haven't seen those in a while, those guys." McHugh and Etok don't have an address in Shaughnessy Village, the western downtown neighbourhood that spreads east from Cabot Square at Atwater Ave. to Guy St.
But like dozens of other people who panhandle, drink, scrounge, steal or smoke pot and crack cocaine on its streets and in its laneways, they have made a home here.
They are an imprint on a neighbourhood that is already marked by a rotted corner at Ste. Catherine and Chomedey Sts. where the Seville Theatre shut down 25 years ago.
The itinerants who populate Shaughnessy Village are drawn to the cavity that the full block between Chomedey and Lambert Closse St. has become.
But they are just one link on a chain that includes the drug dealers who prey on them and the church and community support services that serve hot soup and band-aids to deep-rooted social problems in a neighbourhood that has been stray for years.
At some point, Shaughnessy Village became the place where government authorities shovel and ignore problems related to poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, inadequate mental health services and crises in aboriginal communities. Here, they developed roots alongside the working poor, college and university students and the middle class.
The less that the various levels of government do to tackle homelessness, crime and overcrowding in aboriginal communities, the stronger the itinerant community in Shaughnessy Village becomes.
That leaves individual residents, police officers and community workers to babysit societal problems that bring together people like Etok and McHugh in Cabot Square.
"I love you," Etok says without turning to look at her boyfriend of 14 years.
Etok is nearly blind.
"Say it," she says to McHugh, smiling with an open mouth that reveals black-spotted gums and one upper tooth.
"I love you, too," McHugh says, returning the smile. He then rattles out her entire name to make her happy, but stumbles on one of her Inuit middle names.
Etok likes to say she shares her birthday with Expo '67. So if she was born the same year that Montreal was hitting its stride with the world's fair, that would make her 43.
McHugh removes a 40-ounce bottle of Labatt Blue Dry from his jacket and passes it to her.
Their next stop will be St. Stephen's Anglican Church at Atwater and René Lévesque Blvd. for a free homeless meal.
But they have another hour to kill until lunchtime.
The face of homelessness in Shaughnessy Village bears no resemblance to the phenomenon in the rest of Montreal.
Officially, the Inuit make up one-10,000th of the population of Montreal. Yet they are approaching 50 per cent of the homeless population in Shaughnessy Village.
And while the majority of homeless people in the rest of the city are male, a person strolling on Ste. Catherine in Shaughnessy Village is as likely to encounter a homeless woman as a homeless man.
Devin Alfaro, a counsellor with the Tandem municipal crime-prevention group, says his job is to conduct home-safety visits in the western part of Ville Marie borough to advise residents on how to prevent break-ins.
But he spends large amounts of his workday counselling residents in Shaughnessy Village on how to deal with the itinerants who badger them on the street for money and get rowdy in the laneways around their homes.
"The broader problems of our society wind up here," Alfaro says.
"The homeless wind up here, but the homeless problem doesn't start here." A part of it begins in the far north, where Quebec Inuit are also homeless.
Ten thousand Inuit live above the 55th parallel in the region of Nunavik, in 14 villages dotting the coast from Hudson Bay to Ungava Bay.
There, the problem is a housing shortage due to overcrowding.
The supply of housing hasn't kept pace with the growing population in Nunavik.
Houses with three bedrooms can be home to as many as 20 people. Overcrowding leads to emotional and physical abuse. It deprives children of a place to study. It contributes to suicide, alcohol, cocaine and solvent abuse. It spreads illness, which helps to explain why the tuberculosis rate is 15 times the Canadian average and infant mortality is five times higher.
So some Inuit come to Montreal to flee abuse. And some are brought to the city by the Quebec health department to get medical treatment at a local hospital or to accompany a patient.
***
Connie seats herself on the top step of the statue base in Cabot Square with her companion, an even younger-looking woman she calls a cousin, and unrolls a plastic grocery store bag with her cigarettes.
It's midday under a blue sky and spring is in the air.
This summer will mark 11 years that Connie has been in Montreal, more than one-third of her 32 years.
She followed her younger brother out of Nunavik. "I was supposed to just visit and I wound up living here," she says, tossing back her long black hair.
He's dead, she says matter-of-factly. "Alcohol poisoning," she says. He was 25.
Three men and two women appear at the base of the statue. A skinny woman with dark hair and bright red streaks passes around what looks at first like a giant soft-drink bottle. It's a 40-ounce bottle of Molson Berry Dry.
People start to gather around the statue in late morning. They gather again in the early afternoon after lunch at the Chez Doris day shelter for women tucked behind the Seville block, or at the Open Door drop-in centre at St. Stephen's church.
The police and city officials think the Inuit don't integrate with other homeless people because they can't speak French and hardly speak any English. But that seems to have changed - a lot of them, like Connie and Etok, have been in Shaughnessy Village for many years, learning English in the meantime. They bond, share their cigarettes and some carry drugs for the dealers. They've formed their own community.
"We have our little gang," Connie says, wiping her mouth and taking a drag of her cigarette. "We're like a group. We help each other."
Connie does not beg for change on the street. But like other women on the street around here, she's evasive about how she survives.
A sandy-haired man with a baseball cap and an old-looking face leans in close to Connie.
"Look," he says with a gravel voice as he lifts his shades to reveal pale blue eyes. "They're clear."
Connie nods and flashes a dimpled smile. But he continues to leer.
"You're nice and fresh," he says to her. "You've always been fresh. Nice and fresh."
***
The people who work for Chez Doris and other shelters know every wrinkle on the face of homelessness in Shaughnessy Village.
A lot of the women Sylvie Cornez sees at Chez Doris, where she is executive director, are fleeing violence. But addiction and mental illness are pervasive, too.
"We're pushing people out of the hospitals and we create a social problem," she says.
"We had a good social network that's deteriorating. These people remind us of that."
The Quebec government has to come up with a plan to deal with homelessness in the province, Cornez says.
"People need medical attention," she says. "They don't need to be put on the street with a prescription."
Charlotte Pien is the only outreach worker at the Native Women's Shelter. It's her job to check up on the homeless aboriginal women who have used its services.
She has 177 clients. The shelter has only 13 beds.
The location of the shelter is confidential, but she says it's not in Shaughnessy Village. Still, most of her clients, almost all of them Cree and Inuit, hang out in the neighbourhood. The address gets around by word of mouth.
***
A van with a logo marked Northern Quebec Module is parked with its engine idling on Ste. Catherine, at the bottom of Chomedey.
The driver is waiting for the Inuit clients who are lodging in two hotels up the street on de Maisonneuve Blvd. to take them to their medical appointments.
Merchants across the street see vans like this one almost every day, but never know what they're doing there.
The Northern Quebec Module is run by two hospitals and the province's regional health and social services board in the north. It flies patients and their companions into the city for specialized medical services that aren't available in the north, drives them to and from appointments and puts them up in what it calls transit houses before flying them back.
Residents in Notre Dame de Grâce recently signed a petition to get the transit house on St. Jacques St. near Grand Blvd. moved.
When there's overflow, as there often is, the organization sends patients and their companions to hotels, including in Shaughnessy Village.
Sometimes they get lost.
"They meet with people from their community on the street and they end up staying," Pien says. It's a polite way of saying the offer of alcohol lures them onto the street. "When their time is up, they miss their plane and they're stuck here."
In fact, the goal she sets with several of her clients is to get back home. "But sometimes they get into a party and they forget that idea," she says.
Jeannie May, executive director of the Nunavik regional board of health and social services, one of the agencies responsible for the system, says she knows of no former patients who are currently on the street in Montreal. But then, "we don't deal with the people that are homeless down south."
The Northern Quebec Module follows up on the patients and ensures they return home as soon as possible, she says. Still, May says, "we can't control people. They're adults. If they choose to stay, they choose to stay."
***
Adalbert Pimentel, a community police officer with Station 12 in Westmount, could earn a degree in sociology with what he's seen patrolling western downtown.
But even he doesn't have the answer to the homeless crisis.
"There are just so many factors," Pimentel says.
"Everybody has their own opinions or judgments. But the more you work, the more you find out and the more you find out, the less you know."
Station 12 commander Stéphane Plourde has assembled a new unit teaming community officers and social workers to follow up on some of the most troublesome homeless people known to the police in the area. The unit will make sure they get psychiatric help and other services they need.
Station 21, covering the rest of downtown, launched such a unit in January, modelling it after the Homeless Outreach Team that was tested by the San Diego police department.
Plourde has also just added a third full-time officer to Station 12's bike patrol unit. Bikes are harder to detect from a distance than a patrol car.
It's an uphill battle against an army of homeless, but one thing has become clear.
"The solution is not giving them a fine," Pimentel says of the homeless people. "It doesn't solve the problem."
The businesses that operate in Shaughnessy Village are also learning to manage the homeless problem.
The Pepsi Forum tolerates loitering, so long as the itinerants don't hassle anyone, says André Jude, vice-president and general manager of New York-based Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp., which owns the former home of the Montreal Canadiens hockey team.
"Many of them are not alcoholics or drug addicts - they're people who fell through the cracks," he says.
"When it's 25 degrees below outside and they have nowhere to go, to the extent that they don't disrupt other people or cause problems for individuals, we tend to be somewhat tolerant of their presence in our building. We're open 22 hours a day."
Jude lived in a rooming house on Lincoln Ave. when he was a student in the 1970s and early '80s, back when Shaughnessy Village was known among some as "Booster Village" because a lot of the shoplifters who worked the downtown core lived there.
"I had several of them who were neighbours who would solicit me when I was coming home," he says.
The Seville was a rundown repertory theatre by that point, but at least it was still operating, as were the other businesses on the block. The public-transit bus terminus around Cabot Square was also busier then.
The recession and the real-estate crash in the early 1990s hammered western Ste. Catherine, maybe worse than other parts of downtown.
The provincial government's decision in 1997 to deinstitutionalize psychiatric patients by closing half of psychiatric hospital beds only compounded the problem, Jude says. And the lack of public services now to help those same people who are on the street puts a burden on Shaughnessy Village to deal with a problem that goes well beyond the neighbourhood, he says.
And the problems will still be there if and when the Seville block gets redeveloped.
"If everything turns around in the next several years, I'm not sure what happens to this problem," Jude says. "I think it probably gets exported somewhere else."
Mahsa Alishah can't complain that business is slow at her Subway franchise on Ste. Catherine near Chomedey, not with LaSalle College across the street.
But she's convinced her business has suffered because this stretch of Ste. Catherine doesn't get as much pedestrian traffic as farther east. The students tell her they prefer to get off at Guy métro station, a five-minute walk from the college, rather than at Atwater, which is just a minute away, to avoid the transients in front of the Seville.
She's also had enough with homeless people using her restaurant's washroom. She's about to install a buzzer system so her employees can keep them out.
***
City hall and the Ville Marie borough may ignore Isabelle Fougnies's letters complaining about the itinerants, drugs and alcohol in front of her house on Chomedey, but she won't give up.
She's hopeful again after spending two hours with members of a group that mediates between homeowners, community groups and homeless people in turf battles like the one on Chomedey.
The Projet Équipe de Médiation Urbaine, or ÉMU, called Fougnies after she spoke up about the problems at a borough council meeting in January.
ÉMU has dealt with about 100 cases since it was set up as a pilot project in Ville Marie borough in 2007.
Fougnies says she gave the group plenty of suggestions. She suggested the CLSC that serves western downtown should hire personnel to work with homeless people. And the Montreal Children's Hospital, across the street from Cabot Square, should offer social workers to work with the parents of Inuit children who are brought in for treatment, to make sure they aren't dragged onto the street.
"They said they couldn't promise anything, but they'll contact all of them," Fougnies says.
***
Philippe Lavigne doesn't want to remember what it's like not to eat.
He was homeless until two years ago, sleeping in shelters and scrounging for food on downtown Ste. Catherine. He lost his job four years ago when a back injury made him unable to work. Then depression set in, and he wound up on the street at the age of 42.
Now he's standing on the same sidewalk, with a neat goatee and buzzed hair, dressed in suit pants and a blue coat emblazoned with the yellow logo of the downtown merchants' association, Destination Centre-Ville.
The group quietly began recruiting homeless men like Lavigne in shelters more than three years ago to staff its sidewalk-cleaning brigade. Lavigne opened a bank account and rented an apartment after only a month on the job. He's since worked his way up to manager of the 27-person crew, which swells to 40 in the summer. Their average age is 54. Now Lavigne does the hiring to fill 40-hour-a-week positions that pay a little above minimum wage.
The job qualifications, like the tasks, are simple enough. "If their eyes light up when they talk about the job, that's the guy you want," he says. "We're probably the only guys who will forgive you 40 times as long as you keep trying."
Every employee gets a uniform, right down to steel-toed boots, and gets assigned one of 14 zones along Ste. Catherine, starting at Atwater in Shaughnessy Village to St. Urbain St. in central downtown. "You focus on one square of sidewalk," Lavigne says. "You clean it and carry on. There's nothing else to think about, so you can think through your problems in life."
Lavigne greets Christian, who's begging for change with a paper cup outside the building that houses the cleaning brigade's headquarters at Ste. Catherine and Metcalfe St. Christian, who's worked odd jobs in construction and as a machinist, is on Lavigne's waiting list for a job.
"I'm bored," Christian says. "I want to start my life again as soon as possible."
It seemed risky at first to be hiring homeless people, says André Poulin, the executive director of Destination Centre-Ville who came up with the idea. "But it's worked so well, I hope it multiplies."
The program's success has Poulin seeing the homeless situation in a more positive light than most people. "We shouldn't make too big a deal about it," he says, arguing there are no more than 10 homeless people in Shaughnessy Village. "The problem is less blatant than it was three or four years ago."
***
Before the authorities can count the number of homeless people, they'll have to agree on what homelessness is.
For instance, Etok and McHugh have a postal code - they rent a room in someone's apartment in St. Henri.
But they spend all of their time, and welfare cheques, in Shaughnessy Village, lured by free charity lunches, cheap dépanneur beer and pot and crack. Etok came to Montreal from Ungava, fleeing a husband who beat her. McHugh once had a house in Pierrefonds, a car and three kids. He lost all that after his 18-year marriage ended. Then he was fired from his electrician job and wound up on welfare and eventually the street.
The two met around Cabot Square 14 years ago. He'll mark his 58th birthday here in a week.
"They're sneaky buggers," he says, getting back to the subject of the police. With the new police bike patrols, they're even harder to spot, he says. "You're watching for cars and stuff and all of a sudden, boom they're there on their bikes."
They drink about four of the 40-ounce bottles of Blue Dry between them in a day. That doesn't include the red wine a friend of theirs has brought in his sleeve to share this day.
"Take me to the hospital, fill me up with morphine and tie me up for a month and maybe I'll stop," McHugh says. "Till they let me out."
"There's always been transients around here," he says. "There's always been alcoholism. There's always been pot. But the biggest increase has been crack, crack, crack, crack."
"I don't do crack," Etok says, flashing a smile.
"Liar, liar, pants on fire," he says.
Then he suddenly gets serious. "Alcohol is a big problem," he says. "They die."
Is that going to happen to him?
"Yes. I'm already 58."
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/health/Shaughnessy+Village+Life+among+ruins/2732541/story.html#ixzz0jV4KKG82
