Nearly four months after a homeless encampment under the Ville-Marie Expressway was dismantled, about two-thirds of the people who were evicted are still unhoused, according to advocates.
Community workers argue that given the number of people in the city who are living in makeshift shelters, a strategy, other than simple eviction, needs to be developed.
“Encampments are going to be with us for a while,” David Chapman of Resilience Montreal told Global News. “That’s just the facts. The question is, how do we engage them in a responsible manner?”
Some former campers are still being moved around, like Jacko Stuben. He and one other person moved to a wooded spot near Atwater Avenue, next to the Ville-Marie Expressway, not far from where he and more than a dozen others were evicted by Transports Québec last July to make way for what the ministry said was urgent repair work.
Now he says Transports Québec has given him until Thursday to move from his new spot which is next to the expressway worksite.
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“We’re just going to move to a different location,” he said. “It’s not easy for us because they’re just throwing us out.”
Earlier this year, advocates for the homeless tried but failed to quash the eviction order for the 15 campers in court. They argued that forcing campers to leave without giving them an alternate living space was not wise and stressed that the group would simply split up and become isolated.
Community workers say that is exactly what happened.
“Sadly, where they’ve ended up are dark alleyways, small forested spots and abandoned buildings,” Chapman said.
A few of the campers did get lucky.
“Some of them, we’re talking about four or five, have been housed already,” said Marie-Pier Therrien, head of communications at the Old Brewery Mission. “One of them is actually here at Pavillion Marcelle and Jean Coutu.”
The other 10 have dispersed, including one who Chapman says now lives in an abandoned building but refuses to say where.
“Because he knows that if I’m coming to visit him, if others are coming to visit him, the probability is higher that he will be chased out of that location,” he explained.
He added that the danger with repeated eviction is that people eventually go underground, which means they could end up dead, from accidental drug overdose for example, because social service workers lose track of them.
According to Montreal Public Health, of the 175 Montrealers who died in the city between August 2022 and July 23, nine per cent were homeless.
Chapman says there are increasingly more isolated camps and he’s afraid that Stuben might end up going into hiding too.
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