by CHRISTINE MAKI

Gentrification has been blamed for everything from rent hikes and condo construction to price increases at your local fruiterie. Now, with Consider Your Place, Quebec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG)-McGill’s popular education series on gentrification and housing rights in Montreal, you can learn what you can do to fight it.

“It’s an important issue right now,” says Indu Vashist, one of the event’s organizers. “Montreal’s a hot spot and a lot of people, especially people with money, are coming in. The newcomers may or may not stick around, but once the rent and cost of living increase, they don’t go down. So, in the end, it affects the people who stay here, who can no longer afford to live in the same neighbourhoods.”

The series focuses on Milton-Parc, St-Henri and Mile-End, three Montreal neighbourhoods that have been hit hard by the gentrification process.

“When you rent a place, you don’t think about how you fit into the wider fabric of the neighbourhood,” she says. “You think, ‘I need a roof over my head,’ and that’s it. But something like this shows you that you fit into a bigger picture, that you have a responsibility as a tenant.”

She also hopes these events will bring neighbours together. “Talking to people in your neighbourhood and thinking about your neighbourhood as a neighbourhood is the first step in fighting gentrification. Once you’re invested in where you’re living, then you’ll want to keep things livable for everybody,” she says.

This was one of the lessons learned from what’s known as the Milton-Parc Affair, Canada’s largest resident-developer confrontation which took place in the McGill ghetto during the 1960s. Activists from the era were on hand last Wednesday to speak about the struggle and their successful bid to keep at least some of the old row houses standing.

The next event in the series takes place on Sunday, June 18 in St-Henri, featuring a walking tour of the neighbourhood followed by a community picnic and screening of the film Going Condo: The Gentrification of St-Henri. The final event, “Hipsters Against Gentrification…?” on Wednesday, June 28, will feature an anti-gentrification strategy session and screening of Boom: The Sound of Eviction, a film about artist neighbourhoods and gentrification in San Francisco.

Vashist says that so-called hipsters—artists, musicians and so on—are a key element in the gentrification process. “Artists move into a cheap neighbourhood and the cultural capital they bring makes it cool. Then yuppies and developers move in with money, actual capital, and drive artists and others out.”

She’s worried that hipsters are migrating from Mile-End to traditionally immigrant neighbourhoods like Parc Ex, where the cycle will begin again, eventually displacing the area’s current low-income residents.

“We can’t keep moving,” she says. “We need to stay where we are, where gentrification is happening now, to fight the process.”

To that end, lawyers from the Mile-End Mission will be at the strategy session to explain how to fight rent increases and evictions and the importance of lease transfers. Vashist also hopes residents at both events will compare notes on their experiences fighting landlords, helping each other keep their neighbourhoods affordable and their communities sustainable.

Visit www.ssmu.mcgill.ca/qpirg or call 398-7432 for details.