When Community Groups Take the Lead: Third Sector Responses to Poor Housing and Gentrification in Two Transitional Immigrant Neighborhoods of Montreal
The aim of this paper is to present the initiatives implemented locally by community organizations to fight against poor housing in two transitional immigrant neighborhoods of Montreal. Based on a qualitative methodology, it uses participatory observation carried out over three years as a volunteer with two tenants' rights organizations, the Parc-Extension Action Committee, and the Bureau Info Logement in Saint-Michel. The research also mobilizes the analysis of about thirty semi-structured interviews conducted with various professionals in the housing sector in the two neighborhoods. In Parc-Extension and Saint-Michel, residents, most of whom are working poor immigrants, face many problems of insalubrity and overcrowding, but also the impacts of the gentrification dynamics taking place in these transit areas. To meet these different challenges and to compensate for the lack of intervention by public authorities, community organizations are mobilizing and proposing innovative responses ranging from individual support for tenants to the promotion of social housing through protests in the public space, and participation in community housing development projects adapted to the needs of households. However, while the third sector seems to be playing an increasingly important role at the local level, one may wonder whether this approach to the problems of poor housing by community organizations does not help to legitimize the lack of intervention by institutional stakeholders in the sector.