MONTREAL – It was a blustery fall morning this week when Alexandre Viau drove to a graffiti-infested part of Notre Dame de Grâce for another long day on the job.
He surveyed the numerous graffiti tags covering the length of a private home on Addington St. and then went to work.
He sprayed the tags with an eco-friendly cleaning solution and let it seep into the bricks. After brushing for several minutes, he used a pressure washer to blast the unsightly tags with hot water until they eventually disappeared.
When the $400 cleaning operation was finished, Viau had a lengthy list of other N.D.G. properties covered with graffiti needing to be removed or painted over.
At this time of year, Viau’s boss, Sebastian Pitre, is usually thinking about storing his power washers and cleaning products for the winter. But that has not been the case this fall.
“We are busier than ever because there are so many contracts,” said Pitre, owner of Solutions Graffiti, a private company.
Two Montreal boroughs that have been hardest hit by graffiti have launched renewed campaigns this year to battle a plague that has blighted some of the nicest streets in N.D.G., Ville Émard, Point St. Charles and St. Henri.
In N.D.G., the borough council has made it mandatory for owners of large residential, commercial and industrial buildings to remove graffiti from their properties or face hefty fines.
Last year, the borough spent about $600,000 removing graffiti from public monuments and public buildings, and gave a further $125,000 to Prevention N.D.G., a non-profit organization, to clean up private properties by painting wall murals.
Each week, the borough sends Pitre a list of addresses where tags need to be removed or painted over.
Sometimes, workers return to the same property repeatedly because taggers continue to “bomb” the same areas with spray paint.
On occasion, taggers have left defiant messages to Pitre’s staff: “Better luck next time” or “We will be back.”
Homeowners often stop Viau to thank him for his hard work, but he said they are often frustrated “because they know the taggers usually return.”
In the Sud Ouest borough, elected officials have pledged to spend $350,000 this year on various graffiti-removal measures.
Pitre, whose company has received a $70,000 cleaning contract from the borough, said some neighbourhoods in that area had “become so awash with graffiti that there were very few places left to tag.”
The cleaning campaign is part of a multi-pronged approach to the graffiti problem, said Huguette Roy, a city councillor who is spearheading the campaign in the borough.
Roy acknowledged that her borough can’t solve the graffiti problem on its own because removing all the tags is too costly. Instead, the borough has purchased powerful pressure hoses that residents can borrow if they want to remove the graffiti themselves.
They have also turned to seasoned graffiti artists to try to educate young students about the senselessness of random tagging. The borough has a “legal wall” in Point St. Charles and is looking to find other areas where young people can “express themselves,” Roy said.
Last year, the city of Montreal gave boroughs the responsibility of tackling the graffiti problem on their own. But Roy criticized that decision, saying she believes Montreal needs an island-wide plan. She questioned the wisdom of having different policies in different boroughs.
“Montreal needs to take a leadership role on this issue, like they have done in other North American cities and in Europe,” she said.
Removing graffiti is costly, and Roy acknowledged the central city has spent millions of dollars ($16.5 million between 2006 and 2010) fighting the problem.
Pitre said he knows at least three people who have moved out of the Sud Ouest borough because they could no longer tolerate the graffiti.
“One woman sold her apartments because she couldn’t rent them,” he said. “People saw all the graffiti and were saying: ‘What is going on here?’ “
The popularity of tagging in recent years appears to be a reflection of society’s need to express itself, Pitre suggested.
“People express themselves on Facebook and Twitter,” he said. “It is like when we were young and we carved our names (in a tree or a bench) saying we had been somewhere.”
About 90 per cent of people who do graffiti in Montreal are between 14 and 25 and are from all social classes, Pitre said.
“Some have great jobs and others live in million dollar homes,” he said.
So what should disgruntled residents and small business owners do if their properties are repeatedly tagged with graffiti?
“The best advice I can give people is to complain to their borough and to the police,” he said. “The people who complain are the ones who get their houses cleaned.”
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