Empty spaces, no vacancy

>> Boarded-up buildings still a common sight during the housing crisis

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Photos by Jason Felker

Walk through some sections of the city and you might imagine that selected buildings had received word of an impending tsunami: windows are covered in plywood, doors shut for good. The reality, however, is almost as strange. While the city endures a serious housing crisis—the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation reports the greater Montreal area has 0.6 per cent vacancy rate, with one-12th the number of vacant apartments as a decade ago—hundreds of residential properties are boarded up throughout the city.

One might do well to look east for guidance—the East End, that is. That’s where, seven years ago, a group called the Collective en aménagement urbain Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, (CAUHM) decided to do something about the plywood plague that hit once-decent rental properties. Group members started walking regularly throughout the neighbourhood with notepads, maintaining an up-to-date inventory of abandoned buildings. They found out who owned the dilapidated properties and tried to persuade them to sell them or fix them up.
The group then helped convince the city to offer grants to renovate barricaded buildings. They set up a Web site to guide potential building buyers, complete with maps of available properties in the area, and began mailing out a regular newsletter to 1,400 people they believed could help lower the dead building blight. The efforts bore impressive results: the 170 empty buildings in 1995 were eventually whittled down to a mere 60.

That’s when the progress slowed. What’s left is a frustrating bedrock of landowners seemingly immune to the group’s attempts to persuade them to do something about their boarded-up properties.

“Some owners have hidden agendas or something,” says Jean Rouleau, a member of the CAUHM. “It’s not a phenomenon that we entirely understand. There are problematic files. Some owners can’t do anything because the ownership of their properties is before the courts, and others are owned by numbered companies. It’s hard to reach the owners to sensitize them to the negative aspect their building brings to the area.”

Rouleau believes that, in some cases, the plywood landlords are mentally ill, and suspects that other owners are criminals who find their property useful for money laundering purposes. The group is now pressuring officials to enact a special tax on landlords of buildings that stand empty for five years, or to allow for demolition if the building is extremely damaged.

Condo dreams

Local housing lobby group FRAPRU, which has been occupying vacant lots and buildings this week to protest the housing squeeze, wants the city to seize properties even sooner.
“We’re asking that any home in Montreal that’s been barricaded for two years be expropriated with minor compensation to the owner and then have it transformed into social housing, or have it demolished to make social housing,” says FRAPRU rep Marie-Josée Toupin. “In the middle of a housing crisis, it’s odious to allow these homes to deteriorate without doing anything.”

Toupin says many owners of barricaded buildings are allowing their structures to fall apart in the hopes of eventually demolishing them and turning them into condos, while other landlords just don’t see a buck in fixing up their property. “When a building needs serious renovations, these owners prefer to leave it abandoned than to renovate it, because they think that tenants are so poor that it’s no use trying to make a profit renting to them,” says Toupin.

FRAPRU plans to hold Mayor Tremblay to a promise he made at a campaign debate the group hosted last fall. “He said that the city has existing methods to force owners to do repairs and eventually take possession of homes, but he wasn’t very precise on how he’d do it and we haven’t heard him discuss it much since he got elected,” says Toupin.
But McGill urban planning professor Jeanne Wolf expresses doubts of an easy solution to the abandoned building problem. “Unless a building becomes a danger to people, you can’t tell owners how to use their building any more than you can tell them what to grow in their garden. If they’re paying their taxes and they’re not causing a nuisance and the thing isn’t falling down, I don’t think that you can intervene,” says Wolf, echoing a view held by several city officials interviewed by the Mirror.

There goes the neighbourhood

Abandoned and neglected propertyisn’t exclusive to poor areas, as some once-stately mansions now left to the dogs include a home on posh Westmount Avenue and another on McNider in Outremont. Fendall House, the oldest home in Côte-des-Neiges, remains vacant since suffering damage while being run by provincial administrators. Meanwhile, the historic Lafontaine House on Overdale, a former apartment building on the block demolished by developers Robert Landau and Douglas Cohen in the late ’80s, became the site of the famous squat last summer.

But according to urban studies doctrine, poor areas are most threatened by the presence of boarded-up buildings. “You have one bad house, then three or four, and then everybody starts moving out. It’s both an indicator and a cause of decline,” says Wolf.
“In Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, the damage was done by dis-investment,” says Jean-Jacques Bohémier, the former director of the CAUHM who has since joined the city as a housing specialist. “The structure of rents and the costs of repairs in certain buildings made it sometimes a better deal to leave it vacant than to renovate it.”

Since the municipal merger, Montreal subsidies now extend to all areas on the island and cover up to 70 per cent of renovations, maxing out at $38,000 per unit. But even with the subsidies, a renovator must sometimes be prepared to front significant cash to rehabilitate a barricaded building, and as a result, new tenants would still have to pay relatively high rents to make the landlord’s efforts worthwhile.

A list of 200 vacant properties within the old city limits can be found at the third floor of the new city hall annex. One need not look far for an example of blight, as a two-storey graffiti-stained red brick building sits directly across the street, at 338 Notre Dame E. The building is listed as the property of Jean-Marie Tannous, who lives in a tall apartment building at Sherbrooke and Atwater. Although the boarded-up building might worry fire officials, anger apartment-hungry tenants, upset city planners and displease tourist bosses, the owner is probably less bothered by it. According to his doorman, Tannous rarely even comes to the city, preferring to spend his time in New York and Paris. :

More deserted domiciles

>> A partial list of stately buildings left to rot

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Photos by Jason Felker

4413 L’Esplanade

A few months back, residents of L’Esplanade south of Mont-Royal noticed a pair of old-timers getting out of a car to see the building they grew up in. They looked on in disbelief at the once-majestic greystone triplex across from Fletcher’s Field: the triplex on one of the city’s most fashionable streets had fallen inexplicably into an advanced state of disrepair. Stairs are missing. In back, scaffolding is permanently in place alongside loose bricks. Across a small courtyard sits a twin triplex also on the fast path to planet plywood.
The owner of the six units in the magnificent buildings is listed as Guy Desrosiers, of 4407 Esplanade, the only occupied unit of the two buildings. The owner was unavailable for comment, but a nearby property owner describes having been rebuffed in his efforts to buy the property for 20 years, which he says have been unoccupied for about a decade.
Another neighbour, Dominique Roberge, says that the real owner of the property is a woman in her 50s who lives with Desrosiers and who is believed to want to demolish the buildings in order to replace them with more lucrative condos such as the buildings next door.

“You see people knocking on her door all the time trying to buy the place,” she says. “It’s very sad.”

4212 Ste-Catherine E.
Lam Chan Tho is many things, including a local lawyer and community activist with an interest in politics. One thing he’s not, he says, is a bad landlord. Tho is partner with David Bercusson, a local accountant, in two numbered companies that bought four properties near Desjardins in the East End seven years ago. According to the CAUHM, one of the companies has since been dissolved for failing to file a tax return. The buildings, erected in 1927, have fallen into such bad condition that one of the four was demolished a few years back, but—to the frustration of other neighbours—Tho opposed the demolition of others. “If you demolish it you’ll have an empty lot and that’s no good, people throw garbage there.” Tho says that generous renovation subsidies don’t do it for him either. “The problem is they jack the tax so high that you can’t afford to have it, and if you want to make it work you have to rent it very high. And in Hochelaga, how can you rent it high to poor people?”
Tho says that unlike his partner Bercusson, he’s been trying to fix up his share of the well-known neighbourhood blight and says he’s repeatedly been spurned in his offers to buy his partner’s share of the real estate. Bercusson did not return calls.

3709-15 St-Ambroise
Since playing a central role in Gabrielle Roy’s 1945 description of squalor in Montreal, the industrial street hugging the north side of the Lachine Canal has become barricade central. For reasons possibly having to do with land speculation in the canal area, St-Ambroise appears more than any other street on the city’s list of abandoned buildings.
This long-barricaded stinkhole was originally four homes built in 1875, a block west of the Atwater market. Although long shut, it has been owned for 18 months by Yves Paquet of Drolet Ave., who snapped it up for $90,000. Since that time the city has agreed to landscape a field opposite to make for a square that will ensure a magnificent vista onto the canal.
Paquet, like many owners of barricaded properties, proved difficult to contact. But according to neighbour and architect Sevag Pogharian, Paquet’s initial notion was to demolish the crumbling building and build seven condos on the site, a project for which he was eligible for $140,000 in grants. But now Paquet’s ready to sell the property, recently evaluated by city tax rolls at $49,000, for $230,000.
Pogharian, like any neighbour of a barricaded property, had trouble finding an insurance company willing to sell him a policy next to what’s often considered a firetrap. He notes that anybody who wants to demolish and build on the site would have to excavate all contaminated soil, a job that can cost up to $50,000, and for which no government subsidy currently exists. Pogharian says he’s looked at many empty lots in the St-Henri area. “Every one I’ve looked at in the area has contained contaminated soil,” he says.

1761-76 Centre
Giovanni Cazzetta called this building home during his most notorious years as leader and co-founder of the Rock Machine biker gang. But since April 1998 he hasn’t been around much, having been sentenced to nine years behind bars for drugs and money laundering. Regardless, the edifice in the shadow of the massive Northern Electric building in the Point has become a boarded-up mess. Although a similar barricaded 11-unit building next door sold recently for $110,000, Cazzetta has no plans peddle his $64,000 piece of real estate, according to a woman who answered the phone at an address listed for him on Versailles.
According to city records, the biker boss has missed tax payments, leading to the possibility that the building will be seized and auctioned off with all other seized buildings in November. If that happens, don’t expect any renovations until one year after. Any former owner whose building is auctioned off for unpaid taxes retains the right to buy the property back at the auctioned price for up to one year. The law effectively discourages new owners from investing in repairs before a year elapses.

100 Somerville, Ahuntsic

“I fell in love with the place the first time I saw it,” says Alberto D’Avidio, describing the former Iraqi consulate across from his house near the Back River in Ahuntsic. “I tried to buy it but they suddenly decided not to sell, so I moved in across the street.” One night during the Iran-Iraq war, officials emptied the place during the night and never returned. Since then the magnificent property has fallen into serious disrepair and is only home to the occasional squatters able to get through the wrought iron gates surrounding the 440,800 square foot property. Neighbours say that one squatter became so attached to the place that he’d frequently be seen mowing the lawn. Lately, the gated property has become a free-for-all, with animals and children hanging out on the site. Three years ago a fire damaged the 1900-built mansion, on which the Iraqi government pays $10,618 a year in taxes. The Iraqi embassy in Ottawa did not respond to questions about the future of the building. “It’s a beautiful property,” says D’Avidio. “It’s very hard to see it deteriorate like that.” :