I grew up in an HLM.
Posted at 8:00 am
Every Friday my little brother and I would come to our dad’s townhouse on Habitat Street. He was ill and had little income, hence our place in a low-income hostel. I won’t specify it so that our situation seems nobler to you. There’s no better reason than another when it comes to being able to afford a roof over your head. I’ll just underline it so you know that despite the little yo-yo context, these weekends in HLM are among the best of my life…
Our small private courtyard opened onto a shared property bordered by a river. My brother would sometimes pitch his tent there for an outdoor adventure. (Unfortunately) a long fence prevented us from bathing in the heavily polluted water.
Behind our lodging is a park enclosed between four residential buildings. There, at the age of 13, I wrote my first novel, which dealt with espionage, love and political intrigue. The ten-page story was never published, but note that its only reader (my neighbor Maxime) thought it was “still good”.
What touches me the most when I think back to those years is that my friends were always at our house. I might have been embarrassed to show them our little kingdom built on poverty (especially as they came from fairly wealthy families), but I don’t think I’ve ever felt the slightest shame. The truth is that they felt comfortable there and so did I.
It wasn’t the splendor that made our home cozy, it was the world inside. Love impregnates even in the walls.
In all honesty, I knew we lived there because we would never have the means to live anywhere else, but little did I know how precarious the weight was. I felt like I was growing up in a tight-knit mini-village. A village whose resilience breaks my heart today.
How many parents, rue Habitat, are wondering how to meet the needs of their little ones? How many isolated seniors? Of people who had strayed from a path that might have been the right one? About people we had eliminated together, who could have been the right ones?
My HLM allowed me to go very early to meet the Poqués.
There were kids who came to play at the edge of the fence, to avoid their alcoholic father, or to find a little innocence in a daily routine that was certainly not full of it. From a young age there were tired faces. I quickly understood that not everyone starts at the same place in life. As death hovered in vain at home, we belonged to the spoiled…
There was solidarity in our HLM.
Our old neighbor shoveled our driveway when insomnia struck him. I sometimes babysat the kids across the street from the single mom who needed a break. Every summer a community worker organized a party for the local youth. Thanks to her, I learned how to make paper mache pinatas and manage a cheering crowd.
They will tell me that everything exists no matter what neighborhood. Probably. But I have the impression that the cohesion is different when it goes from injury to injury. We were all fallible. We knew it was a chance to have each other.
I left Rue Habitat at the age of 16 when my father left this country. I went back there for the first time last summer… The place seemed damaged to me. A lot more than I remember.
I don’t know if it was because my kid’s eyes didn’t catch the falling clapboards or if it was because the place was really falling into disrepair, but one thing is for sure, the love we injected into the walls wasn’t enough out to keep them worthy.
Then, this week, I learned in my press that1: “More than 40% of the province’s 65,000 low-cost housing units are rated D or E, meaning they need major work,” according to the Association of Low-Income Housing Renters of Quebec and the Residents’ Advisory Committee of the Montreal Metropolitan Housing Authority.
I also learned from this article by Isabelle Ducas that: “As more and more homes in aging HLMs become uninhabitable, government funding for their renovation continues to fall: it has declined from an average of $352 million per year between 2015 and 2019, according to FLHLMQ 2019 and 2022 to 281 million per year. »
Without making a direct connection between my memories and the recent state of HLM I grew up in, I immediately felt the need to remind myself how important these environments are.
Of course, they don’t just hide lives as sweet as mine. I know that poverty is a factor that can contribute to many inequalities, violence and excesses… But I also know that many HLM tenants benefit from the resources offered by skilled community workers and from an environment that supports theirs understand reality a little better. by sharing parts of it.
Beyond the housing rights they offer, HLMs are places that can create networks you can count on when you feel like the world has failed you.
Or that yours is about to collapse.
(I know what I’m talking about.)
It would be the least of them to be given the care they deserve.