Reviving a historical landmark to reclaim public space
Author: Asher Kui, News Editor
You pass by this intersection daily—whether on a BIXI bike back to your Plateau apartment, or on your stream of grocery shopping activities at Metro and Dollarama in the Complexe La Cité. Yet it rarely registers in your memory, silently blending into your daily routine. Where is it?
On av. du Parc, coin de la rue Milton, are the premises of what used to be Chez Gautier. Originally a fur trading store, it was later turned into a sewing machine shop before pastry chef Moïse Gautier acquired it in 1976. Gautier, who owned the Belgian pastry shop right next door, transformed the small space into a Parisian-style café, which in the 1980s and 1990s attracted many locals and tourists. While it was rumoured that in 2012, his daughter Stéphanie Gautier took the business into her own hands and renovated it in her father’s legacy, Chez Gautier ultimately shut down indefinitely a year later. A real estate developer purchased the property in 2013, and it has remained vacant ever since—along with its unused parking lot.
For 12 years, the empty property has been left abandoned while its futility continued to bring harm to the community socially and environmentally. Today, the Milton-Parc community has spoken: The Chez Gautier campaign petitions for the property located at 3487 av. du Parc to be transformed into a housing program to accommodate the community’s growing needs.
Since 2019, asking rents on the Island of Montreal have surged by 71 per cent. Centraide Montreal announced in 2023 that 360,000 households, representing one in five across the city, cannot afford rent and basic necessities. Amid the soaring housing costs, the Chez Gautier campaign calls on the city to take concrete action. The first step of the campaign is to pressure the city to acquire the land from private estate developers, ensuring its service to the community’s urgent needs.
//Expropriation as a political tool//
In an interview with //The Tribune//, Jacob Réal, Membership Delegate of the Chez Gautier campaign, explained that one of the campaign’s core goals is to set a political example for affordable housing in Montreal.
“The project is part of a fight for decommodifying housing on the Island of Montreal. We aim to establish a political precedent that expropriation of unused land is a possibility in constructing more social housing in the heart of Montreal,” Réal said. “The way of solving a housing crisis [should be] […] a confrontation between locals and land speculators.”
Expropriation is defined as a municipality’s forcible acquisition of private land for public utility through compensating the landowner financially. The Chez Gautier campaign urges Montreal’s city council to use Articles 51 to 56 of the Loi sur la Société d’habitation du Québec to acquire and expropriate the vacant property. While this legal tool exists, the city council has rarely applied it in Montreal’s housing context, making the campaign an ambitious one.
Sophie Keenan, Campaign Assistant of the Chez Gautier Campaign, wrote to //The Tribune// that the campaign remains in its early stages, with a focus on pushing the city to obtain the land.
“Right now the campaign is focused on pressuring the city to expropriate the lot, which would be a precedent-setting victory [….] This is a long-term project,” she wrote.
To move toward this goal, the campaign is engaging in community outreach and petitioning for enough signatories to trigger a legal process. Yet expropriation raises questions about political will and public perception. Réal highlighted how expropriation, although an effective measure, may be received poorly in the community.
“While [expropriation] is possible, [the city] has never done it because it can be viewed as aggressive towards the neighbourhood’s landowners,” he said.
While expropriation may face resistance, other recent government actions show where priorities lie. The Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) recently drafted a new regulation that reduces the number of variables when calculating annual rent increases—a move many Montrealers see as yet another sign of how the city’s policies favour landlords over tenants.
“We need to change the narrative that the way out [of a housing crisis] is to collaborate with real estate developers and speculators, as they are incentivized to maintain a housing crisis [….] We are trying to use expropriation and direct government action to create a mixed-use neighbourhood that encourages developers to incorporate affordable housing into the city,” Réal said.
In June, the Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee (MPCC) finalized the Chez Gautier petition, which has since been in circulation around the neighbourhood. Réal noted that the majority of Milton-Parc residents support the project.
//Private landowners vs public need//
The push to transform Chez Gautier has not been without resistance. While many in Milton-Parc view the campaign as an opportunity to reclaim long-abandoned space for the community, others are concerned about what new housing might bring to the neighbourhood.
Réal acknowledged that some worry the project might increase the number of unhoused individuals in the area, but he described those concerns as out of touch.
“There are a few neighbouring groups that are vocally against the project, but their point of view is, frankly, not in tune with reality. They accuse us of wanting to establish a second La Porte Ouverte […] or even working in secret for them.”
La Porte Ouverte is a shelter that supports people experiencing homelessness, offering different events to accompany unhoused individuals towards a better quality of life. Yet a group of nearby residents has complained that La Porte Ouverte’s presence has attracted people experiencing homelessness to the neighbourhood.
Benjamin Forest, associate professor at the Department of Geography at McGill, wrote to //The Tribune// explaining that in urban theory, people experiencing homelessness are usually not in neighbourhoods with high housing costs.
“[Unhoused peoples’] locations are influenced both by the location of services available and by policing decisions [or in other words, whether] the police permit [them] to stay,” Forest wrote. “Social services tend to be located in low-income areas and police will typically funnel the homeless into lower income areas.”
Nadine Mailloux’s report //Don’t Look the Other Way// investigates a complaint made by a group of Milton-Parc citizens, which calls the homelessness situation in the neighbourhood a crisis due to the severity of safety problems, insalubrity, and violence. While the complaint ultimately aims to change the government’s approach to ending chronic homelessness, it nonetheless reflects a tension common in many urban areas, where anxiety about safety and cleanliness overshadows evidence of the systemic conditions that sustain homelessness.
Moreover, homelessness affects Indigenous Peoples in Canada disproportionately. According to the 2018 census enumeration of unhoused persons, Indigenous Peoples made up 12 per cent of Montreal’s people experiencing homelessness, while representing less than one per cent of the city’s population. This stark disparity illustrates that homelessness cannot be reduced to mere neighbourhood-level complaints—it is tied to Quebec’s colonial legacy that continues to challenge and discriminate against Indigenous Peoples.
Still, Keenan emphasized the importance of not drawing preliminary conclusions based on demographics, as this may manifest false assumptions. The information must be handled with care.
“I push back against highlighting a specific group as the most ‘unhoused’ […] as these types of assumptions turn into misconceptions and stereotyping that we have been working to unpack in our community engagement,” Keenan said. “Wherever they might hail from, we want to propose a systemic solution to a systemic problem, aiming to avoid talking points that lean too heavily on identity politics frameworks while striking a balance of recognizing specific needs and specific ways of living.”
Keenan affirmed that through the Chez Gautier campaign, the Milton-Parc neighbourhood will reap benefits no matter what form of housing program it assumes.
“No matter whether the lot becomes a co-op for elderly people, non-profit housing for low income families, or permanent housing for unhoused Indigenous individuals, it will positively impact the safety and well-being of the neighbourhood,” she said. “Safe and comfortable housing cannot be more of a detriment to the neighbourhood than an ugly, abandoned lot which continues to negatively affect the health and perception of the neighbourhood.”
//Environmental stakes and urban development//
Chez Gautier also claims that the empty parking lot contributes to the urban heat island effect, negatively impacting the health of residents. Low-income families are disproportionately affected due to limited access to air conditioning, while the elderly are vulnerable due to reduced heat tolerance.
In an interview with //The Tribune//, Raja Sengupta, associate professor in the Department of Geography and the Bieler School of Environment at McGill, clarified that the urban heat island effect is actually a nighttime phenomenon.
“All of the solar radiation that’s falling on the concrete around us, especially in downtown Montreal, is going to heat up and get stored,” he said. “The tall concrete structures absorb all that energy [which is released] for the next four or five hours. At 1:00 a.m. at night, that’s when the night temperature is six to seven degrees warmer [than rural areas].”
He continued to explain that the intensity of the urban heat island effect depends on two factors: Sky view and vegetation. While the Chez Gautier campaign affirms that constructing a building on an empty parking lot may ameliorate the urban heat effect, Sengupta’s research provides an insightful imperative.
“Put green roofs on top, and you [may] see a reduction of what is called surface urban heat island. If you were to convert the parking lot into a green park […] the nighttime temperature [may be reduced] by one degree,” Sengupta said. “Why not more? The area has other buildings. [Putting vegetation on one building] is not going to [instantly] bring the temperature down by 9 degrees.”
While one project cannot undo the structural drivers of the urban heat island effect, each redevelopment may promote positive change and continue a trend of ecological urbanism. Choosing to incorporate green design elements—such as a rooftop garden—is a huge leap towards improving the quality of life of Milton-Parc residents.
When navigating between fostering social and environmental improvement along with conserving the city’s patrimony, Réal expressed his skepticism toward the city council.
“The city poses extremely strict regulations on certain individuals, but gives a lot of freedom to developers, often distributing exemptions,” he said. “The only way to preserve the character of a neighbourhood is to involve the local community in decisions that involve development.”
The Chez Gautier campaign stresses that both environmental and heritage concerns must shape development decisions, and that community participation is essential to building an ecological and patrimonial future.
//A long-term vision for Chez Gautier//
Keenan maintained that Chez Gautier will be a long-term project, and that predicting a calendar as of today is unrealistic.
“If the petition succeeds and the city moves forward to expropriate the lot, we will confer with experts to conduct the necessary studies and community consultations,” Keenan wrote. “It is hard to know what a realistic timeline will be at this current stage, but the project will most likely have multiple phases over multiple years.”
In the meantime, McGill students have plenty of opportunities to get involved in the Milton-Parc community. The Milton-Parc Food Bank and Midnight Kitchen are food cooperatives that work to increase food accessibility in the neighbourhood. Art Hives brings residents together through art sessions, while La Porte Ouverte is seeking volunteers to support its mobilization and administrative efforts.
Too often, students remain in the McGill bubble, detached from the realities of the city. But it’s time for McGill students to stand up for their community. Our strength lies in our numbers. McGill’s enormous student population must show the community that we care. Sign the Chez Gautier petition, keep up with information, and volunteer. Milton-Parc’s future is in our hands.
Keenan called for McGill students to approach the people experiencing homelessness with empathy and compassion.
“This area is so populated by young people but many of these [unhoused] individuals go ignored for most of the day [….] Saying hello and offering a smile to individuals who reside on the sidewalks on their walks to and from school is a very simple start for students,” Keenan wrote.
“Remove your bias from pretending that poverty is invisible,” she wrote. “Human kindness does not always require pocket change.”
//For more information and instructions on signing the petition and subscribing to their newsletter, visit the Chez Gautier website.//
//*Quotes from Jacob Réal were translated from French.//
