Why has this N.D.G. social housing building been sitting vacant for 11 years?

The Habitations Chester building on Walkley Ave. was evacuated for repairs in 2013. They were never carried out, and now the crumbling structure must be demolished and rebuilt.
Author of the article: Jason Magder  •  Montreal Gazette Published Aug 06, 2024  •  Last updated 17 hours ago  •  6 minute read

With thousands of Montrealers waiting for social housing, it seems puzzling that a building reserved for those living on the margins has been empty for more than a decade.
But that’s the situation with Habitations Chester, an 18-unit social housing building on Walkley Ave. in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, which has had no tenants since it was evacuated for repairs in 2013.
Now, nearly 11 years later, the building — which includes six one-bedroom, one two-bedroom and 11 three-bedroom units — is beyond repair. It must be demolished and rebuilt, but there are still no plans to conduct the work.
Located at 5210-5222 Walkley, the building was in operation as early as 1989, according to records from the Office municipal d’habitation de Montréal (OMHM), the public corporation that manages the city’s housing stock.

In 2013, an inspection mandated by the OMHM noted extensive problems. A subsequent notice to tenants in August of that year informed them of mould contamination. Work on kitchens and bathrooms was also required. The roof, brickwork and balconies had to be repaired. The building’s doors and windows needed to be replaced.
By February 2014, another notice to then-former tenants stated all the occupants had been relocated, and the OMHM intended to do the work over the course of the year, contingent on funds allocated from its annual budget. The notice also spoke of a meeting held on Aug. 20, 2013, attended by 17 of the 18 tenants. During that meeting, they were informed of the nature of the work and were even asked their preferences for colour schemes for the new balconies.
In February 2016, another notice stated that the OMHM was negotiating with the Société d’habitation du Québec, the province’s housing assistance agency, before being able to find a contractor to do the work.
Still another notice was sent in April 2018, in which the OMHM said it was still waiting for funding, and that a more recent inspection revealed the need to demolish the building and rebuild it.
There has been no official communication with the former tenants since then, as the building continues to languish. A CBC report last year stated there was a fire in the building in 2015.

Speaking for the OMHM, Mathieu Vachon said the corporation recently put out a call for tenders for experts to come up with plans for the building.
“This building of 18 units is vacant and boarded up since 2014,” Vachon wrote in a statement. “In 2012, our experts informed us of the presence of mould caused by water infiltration and excessive humidity in the units, which required major work.
“Unfortunately, we have not been able to prioritize this building with the budgets that have been available over the last few years.”

Vachon said the OMHM has received a record amount of government aid in recent years, but still there has been no money earmarked for Habitations Chester.
“We hope to begin the work in 2025-26,” he wrote.
The OMHM’s explanation rings hollow to the city’s opposition party.
“We can’t afford to wait more than 10 years to renovate a public social housing building when there are hundreds and thousands of families waiting for this type of housing,” said Julien Hénault-Ratelle, the Ensemble Montréal spokesperson for housing issues.
He added that the city has received money from the federal and provincial governments for renovations, but only a fraction has been spent. In 2022, according to an auditor general’s report, the OMHM spent just $15 million of a $94-million grant provided over three years to pay for renovations, he said.

Hénault-Ratelle said this points to a more serious problem of the city’s housing corporation not properly maintaining its own buildings.
“There are close to 1,500 housing units that are plagued with poor maintenance,” he said. “The auditor general considered (the majority) of the city’s social housing in a bad or very bad state. This is unacceptable.”
In a report filed this year, auditor general Andrée Cossette said nearly 24,000 people were on a waiting list for social housing.
Hénault-Ratelle said he is concerned that with so many buildings in a pitiful state, more will be evacuated and left to languish like Habitations Chester. In June, the Rivière-des-Prairies social housing building Habitations Marie-Victorin was evacuated by the OMHM because it was in a poor state. It has not been repaired yet.

Joel DeBellefeuille is the founder and executive director of the Red Coalition, which works to eliminate racial profiling and systemic racism in Canada. He said he believes racism helps explain why the Habitations Chester building has languished for so long.
“If nothing is done about it, the message remains the same: The borough doesn’t care about Black and racialized people in that area,” said DeBellefeuille.
“There is no doubt in my mind that if this was in any other area of (the borough), we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

DeBellefeuille became aware of the building when he lived next to it in 2021 and was a candidate for city councillor in the Loyola district. He sent a letter to the borough complaining about overgrown hedges, garbage littering its grounds and graffiti.
Within an hour, he says, workers from the OMHM came to clean up the area and remove bricks that were in danger of falling. Now, DeBellefeuille says, it seems no one has tended to the building in months or years.
“I think it’s absolutely unacceptable that residents in the area have to be subjected to this type of eyesore for 10-plus years,” he said. “And there is no end in sight.”
Mark Lazar, who owns a building on Walkley, disagrees about racism being at play. He says this is a case of pure bad management.

“There have been millions of dollars invested by the private sector on that street,” Lazar said. “You can’t let a building stay vacant; it deteriorates and then you have to demolish it.”
Lazar said the city’s housing department has hundreds of vacant units, including dozens in Côte-des-Neiges—Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. He volunteers on the board of a social housing organization called Project Chance, which operates 24 units reserved for single mothers going back to school. Those units have been empty since problems were noted with the building’s heating system in 2019.
Lazar said the OMHM seems to lack both the budget and the organizational ability to manage renovations, and there are too many vacant units for the corporation to handle.
“There are lots of ways to do this, but it starts with being imaginative,” he said. “If the city were really serious about doing this, it would find a way to come up with the money and get these projects done.”

A spokesperson for the OMHM confirmed there are 1,465 vacant units among the 20,810 managed by the corporation. However, only 141 of those units still have no confirmed funding to bring them back to the market.
Despina Sourias, the councillor for the Loyola district, said she shares the frustration of citizens eager to see the Habitations Chester building occupied again.
“Our team is well aware of Loyola residents’ frustrations with the building … and we share those frustrations,” she wrote in a statement. “Since the beginning of our mandate, (borough mayor Gracia Kasoki) Katahwa and I have been working to better understand the reasons why this building has been barricaded for so long, and to try to get things moving.
“However, despite various representations to support the prioritization of work in this building, we were quickly confronted with the fact that until recently, there were no funds available (either provincially or federally) to demolish or renovate this building.”