Who will save Milton Park?

1 week ago 23

The crack dealers were back a week after the police arrested five people in a raid on an upper-floor flat in Milton Park in January. A month later, another descent on the apartment netted one arrest. This time, it took only a few days for the building’s tenants to see a resumption of illicit activity.

Overall, things are a little calmer since the police crackdown. But the apartment is still a hub for drug-dealing, the neighbours say. In the meantime, they’re anxious, like they’re waiting for the worst to happen at any moment.

“It’s intimidating when you live somewhere and you realize that you’re not really at home anymore,” said one of the neighbours, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals by the criminals.

“They completely infiltrated the building to do whatever they want.”

The building had issues with some tenants in the past. But it didn’t have a problem with drug dealers until six months ago.

A used condom was found in the laundry room. Outsiders started lurking in the entryway, sassing tenants who told them they shouldn’t be there. Soon, tenants were being woken up at night by strangers banging on their doors in search of that upper-floor flat. Strangers were also smoking “rocks” inside the entrance after jimmying the front door lock.

In a sense, the building matches its neighbourhood.

Public drug use and intoxication have had a greater presence on the streets of Milton Park since Open Door Montréal moved into a church basement on Parc Ave., the neighbourhood’s main thoroughfare, to assist homeless people at the end of 2018.

Row of Victorian buildings in Milton Park neighbourhood.

But at some point in the last year or two — no one can seem to peg exactly when — the individual dealers that prey on unhoused people in the area turned into conspicuous groups of criminals that roam the neighbourhood. Trafficking and ancillary industries — robbery, violence and sexual exploitation — became pervasive instead of concentrated around a troublesome intersection near the shelter.

“Our neighbourhood has become a slum. It really has. It’s sad,” said Antonia Caserta, who raised her family in Milton Park and is now a grandmother living in the same greystone, a block from the dealer-infested building. In December, she bought 30 whistles and distributed them to her neighbours after several of them said they feared walking alone in the neighbourhood, especially at night. The gesture is one of the reasons she was given the nickname “Mother Teresa of Milton Park.”

“It just keeps getting worse and worse, with nothing in sight to help out the residents,” she said.

“Often we feel like we’re being held hostage to the situation.”

Longtime residents like Caserta express dismay that the devastation is happening here, of all neighbourhoods.

Milton Park — named after the intersection of Parc and Milton St. — has long been a model for community collaboration, mutual aid and social justice. Its roots are in an unprecedented battle by citizens in the 1960s and ’70s to save several blocks that were threatened by a gentrification project. After residents beat the odds and prevented the demolition of their homes, they turned the area into the largest non-profit co-operative housing project in Canada.

But 50 years later, Milton Park is on the precipice again, trapped between hope and doom. Drugs and criminals have replaced bulldozers as the existential threat.

Our neighbourhood has become a slum. It really has. It’s sad.

Antonia Caserta Longtime resident of Milton Park

Municipal and provincial authorities are focused on a problem that is visible on the street. They tend to frame the neighbourhood’s woes as a difficult cohabitation between residents and a homelessness resource that accepts people who are also experiencing substance abuse and mental health issues.

But a thin line separates a vulnerable unhoused person and a vulnerable person who has an address. At a deeper level, Milton Park is in the grips of a public health crisis that exists to some degree across the city and that encompasses homelessness, mental illness and substance addiction. They are overlapping emergencies that feed each other and intertwine with a shortage of affordable housing, growing disparity and evictions.

Milton Park is not much bigger than nearby La Fontaine Park, an apostrophe connecting Plateau-Mont-Royal and downtown.

The neighbourhood of about 11,300 residents, known to some as the McGill Ghetto, is bound by University St., at the edge of the McGill University campus, St-Laurent Blvd., Sherbrooke St. W. and des Pins Ave. The co-operative housing project created decades ago occupies the central blocks straddling the Milton-Parc intersection.

Map showing the area of Milton Park in the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough and the borough's single police station.

But while the entire neighbourhood makes up just six per cent of the area of the Plateau and a tenth of its population, it accounts for 24 per cent of all crimes reported in the borough. In fact, Milton Park accounted for over 46 per cent of reported drug offences in the Plateau in 2025.

The neighbourhood also had one homicide and two attempted homicides last year, one of which the police consider drug-related.

Meanwhile, assaults and house break-ins were up in Milton Park by 18 per cent and 21 per cent, respectively, from 2024 to 2025.

Calls to 911 for sexual crimes were up 50 per cent in the same period.

Sylvain Malo, the commander of Station 38, which patrols the Plateau, said residents and merchants in Milton Park told the police last summer that “something was happening,” and that they were seeing new faces and more drug activity.

“We saw an increase in people who were consuming and selling drugs on the ground,” he said.

The station responded in kind by pouring resources into the neighbourhood, including a dedicated patrol car on weekends last summer and two additional officers patrolling Milton Park on bike and on foot year-round. Station 38 has also sent surveillance teams to investigate.

To foster communication with residents and businesses, the station deployed a mobile kiosk and created a prevention program offering the neighbourhood a dedicated phone number and email address to pass on precious information to the police. Messages are monitored by an officer who follows up and dispatches the police as needed.

“We invested time and police in Milton Park to make people feel more secure,” Malo said.

And during a four-month period from this past October to early February, the police made 112 arrests in Milton Park: 14 for drug-trafficking, 37 for drug possession, one for armed robbery and the rest mostly for outstanding warrants and breach of conditions. Officers even caught a burglar while they were conducting an anti-drug operation.

The feedback from the public has been positive, Malo said. He added that arrests were also made in the homicide and attempted homicide cases last year.

The commander maintains that Milton Park isn’t confronting organized crime gangs like the Mafia or the Hells Angels. And there’s no gang turf war, he said, citing information from the police department’s specialized squads. Malo describes the criminals in Milton Park as street dealers at the bottom of the drug distribution hierarchy “who group together for convenience.”

Montreal Police Station 38 commander Sylvain Malo, right, stands with officers Danny Chicoine, left, and Alexandre Gaudet in Montreal's Milton Park neighbourhood.

Still, a troubling trend lurks behind the data.

While crime stats have risen overall in Milton Park, paradoxically seven of the neighbourhood’s “hot spots” — along Parc — saw a 12-per-cent drop in police calls between 2022-2023 and 2023-2024. The most recent police “situation report” on Milton Park noted that since 2023, the hot spots “have become increasingly widespread.”

In other words, crime has bled into the neighbourhood.

Cathy Wong, the newly elected borough mayor of the Plateau, lauds Malo for being “very proactive” on fighting crime in Milton Park.

The situation, she added, is “extremely worrying.” The neighbourhood is at the top of the agenda when she meets with borough officials and partners, she said.

Street intervention workers confirm that the situation in Milton Park became “more intense” in the past 18 months to two years.

There’s more drug-dealing, the workers said. But contrary to the police, they contend that “it’s definitely gangs.”

The Gazette isn’t publishing the names of the outreach workers to protect them from the criminals they encounter.

Whether the dealers are affiliated with established gangs is not the point, said one worker. “These are low-level guys, but all drug use is tied to organized crime.”

Some dealers are also users themselves, the person said. However, “there are definitely rivalries going on.”

Even outreach workers are feeling uncomfortable.

The City of Montreal’s mobile social mediation and intervention team — ÉMMIS — recently informed Milton Park’s neighbour relations committee that its staff are scared of the dealers.

“There has been an increased presence of drug dealers, which is impacting the sense of safety of ÉMMIS staff, particularly in the evenings. They feel watched by the dealers,” the minutes of a committee meeting in February state.

“Comment: If staff feel this way, imagine how the residents feel.”

Richard Phaneuf and Charlotte Thibault in their home in Montreal's Milton Park neighbourhood with a bookcase behind them.

Charlotte Thibault, who has lived in a Milton Park co-op for 43 years, likens the community to the village in the Astérix and Obélix comic book series that pulls together, resists the invaders and gathers for banquets under the stars.

“We feel a bit like the last Gaulish village,” she said. “Co-operative life is a lot of work, but it’s where a group of people who know each other, who are neighbours, can help each other.”

The non-profit neighbourhood within the larger Milton Park neighbourhood is made up of 15 co-ops and six non-profits, which include rooming houses. Combined, they offer 616 housing units at affordable rents to 1,300 residents with mostly low to modest incomes. The Milton Park Community, as it is known, also includes some commercial property.

The non-profit buildings have offered a roof to people at risk of homelessness, people leaving homelessness, refugees and victims of intimate partner violence since the Milton Park Community was created.

The co-ops, meanwhile, which are collectively owned and run by their residents, maintain modest rents and ensure social diversity by selecting people of different ages, incomes and skills that can be useful to maintain the buildings.

The rows of Victorian facades hearken to the bourgeois neighbourhood that developed in the 19th century as institutions like McGill, Hôtel-Dieu Hospital and the Royal Victoria Hospital were established nearby.

It’s a place where neighbours shovel snow off each other’s walkways without being asked, swap casseroles without needing an occasion, organize a food train for a family that is grieving and start a gift collection for one that is celebrating a birth. It’s also a place that comes together for community events, like the annual Fête des voisins that culminates in an alleyway banquet under the stars.

But these days, the co-ops and non-profits are digging into their operating budgets to buy security cameras and replace doors and locks that are broken by dealers, users and thieves, Thibault said. She’s president of the Syndicat de copropriété de la Communauté Milton-Parc, which acts as a condo association for the community.

“Milton Park was home to, and still is home to, progressive people,” Thibault said.

“And this almost goes against our principles. It challenges our very beliefs to have installed cameras. But when people’s lives are in danger, I have no choice but to install cameras.”

Security is now a budget item “as opposed to a once-in-a-while thing,” said Richard Phaneuf, the president of the board of one of the community’s non-profits, the Yellow Door Housing Corp. He is married to Thibault and has lived in Milton Park for 50 years.

The co-ops and non-profit boards can’t pass on the extra costs to tenants because they can’t afford the rent increases, Phaneuf said. So the boards have less money to spend on day-to-day repairs and renovations.

Phaneuf says the public health crisis that has taken hold in the neighbourhood is also harming people transitioning out of homeless — causing them to become homeless again.

Before the arrival of the Open Door, a homeless man who begged for change and slept behind a church in the neighbourhood was taken in by one of the non-profit buildings that rents rooms, he said.

“After Open Door came, he got into crack,” Phaneuf said. “And when he got into crack, his niceness went away. He became belligerent, threatening to kill other tenants.”

The man fell behind on his rent and ended up back on the street in the neighbourhood, Phaneuf said.

“I couldn’t get any help for him from the CLSC. The lack of social services in the community has also compounded the issue.”

The exterior of the Open Door shelter in Milton Park.

Merchants in Milton Park say that thefts are so frequent, they’ve stopped counting what they’ve lost. They also describe a new breed of thief who appeared last year, roaming in groups of four or five, on top of the usual grungy-looking shoplifters.

A merchant recalled one shoplifter last summer wearing what appeared to be a Gucci fanny pack. The person loitered calmly in front of the shop while the merchant was on the phone to 911, trying to explain that the police could catch the thief if they showed up now. The police didn’t come, the merchant added.

“They wear rich people clothes,” the person said. “But when you look at their face — their faces look beat up and they look high.”

Another merchant described the difficulty of retaining staff, who are harassed and threatened by aggressive people and have their personal belongings stolen from the staff room. The odour of crack wafts into the back of the establishment from outside.

“You have the local crack dealers on the corners. Everyone knows of them. They don’t want people interfering with their business.”

The police “are doing the best they can,” the merchant said, but the problems are overwhelming. Some businesses have left the neighbourhood.

“I’m not blaming the shelter 100 per cent because Covid has a big part in it,” the person added. “Covid made things worse for people with mental health issues.”

You have the local crack dealers on the corners. Everyone knows of them. They don’t want people interfering with their business.

Unidentified merchant

However, the merchant expressed anger with the city for allowing the Open Door to move into an area surrounded by an SAQ and dépanneurs that sell alcohol.

“I don’t know what they were thinking by allowing a shelter like this in a densely populated area with lots of families, retired professionals and you’re next to one of the best schools in the country, McGill. It’s poor judgment.”

Wong, however, said the borough didn’t have a say. The church was zoned for community services so the Open Door moved into the church basement with full legal rights. It began as a day shelter, but in the pandemic started operating 24 hours a day with emergency beds that accept people who are intoxicated or high.

The Open Door recently indicated that it’s looking for a new location to expand its services to meet growing demand.

In December, the Plateau borough council approved a $20,000 grant to help the shelter with its relocation project.

But Wong contends the criminals are the problem, not the shelter or its clientele.

In fact, homelessness in Montreal continues to rise. The latest count in April 2025 found there are 5,036 people experiencing visible homelessness in the city, nearly a seven per cent increase over the previous count in 2022.

“The homeless people who go to Open Door are victims of drug trafficking,” Wong said. “That’s the problem we need to target, and not the vulnerable people who are also victims of this drug trafficking.”

The Open Door declined to be interviewed, citing a class-action lawsuit initiated by a Milton Park resident against the shelter, the city and the province. The suit alleges uncivil acts by the homeless clientele and seeks financial damages for each affected person in the community. Open Door spokesperson Mathilde St-Vincent referred questions to the Montreal police.

A judge rejected the class-action application in February, saying the alleged inconveniences caused by homeless people are not in the defendants’ control. However, the plaintiff has filed an appeal.

Youths involved in a March break day camp in Milton Park stand in a half-circle in a gym talking to Sena Aliskandaria and co-worker Marie Bettega.

In the meantime, the community’s youngest and oldest members are confronting Milton Park’s hard reality.

The local day camp says it has added more counsellors and does a syringe sweep when visiting parks.

Last summer, a 15-year-old counsellor was struck on the head with a beer can by an intoxicated person while crossing St-Urbain St. with a group of campers, said Sena Aliskandaria, the youth co-ordinator of the Association récréative Milton-Parc, which runs the camp. Someone started a fire in the playground behind the recreation association one night. And in December, the teenage counsellors and a group of children, aged nine to 12, came upon an armed sexual assault in progress in the Galeries du Parc’s Jeanne-Mance entrance during an outing, he said.

Jennifer Maccarone, the Liberal MNA for Westmount–Saint-Louis riding, which includes Milton Park, said residents have been sending her photos of people defecating, urinating and having sex in their front yards and backyards for years. But last summer, they reached out to her office about a new problem: groups of people occupying their front steps.

Maccarone said the phenomenon prompted frantic calls, mostly from seniors.

“‘ I’m being held hostage because there are people on my stoop and I know that the minute I open my door to go out, they’re going to force their way in because they were trying my door,’” she said, recounting the words of one caller. Her office referred them to 911.

Cover image of a 2022 City of Montreal ombudsman's report on the unhoused crisis in Milton Park.

A May 2022 investigation by the City of Montreal ombudsman into cohabitation problems with the Open Door was supposed to rouse the city and province to action.

The report, entitled Don’t Look the Other Way, chastised the public authorities for working in an “accountability vacuum” where “everyone passes the buck” on the homelessness crisis. They had no co-ordinated or long-term plan to prevent homelessness among the Inuit population who frequent the Open Door or to help unhoused people who have drug addictions, ombudsman Nadine Mailloux concluded.

The province and the city responded with new committees, a “crisis unit” that had been recommended by Mailloux, a police action plan and the deployment of the ÉMMIS team. The federal and provincial governments announced funding for a permanent homeless Indigenous resource in the neighbourhood that is to open in 2027. Even Lionel Carmant, the Quebec social services minister at the time, visited the neighbourhood.

No one expected things to get worse. But they did.

Now an independent study, presented in October, offers insight into how drugs and crime became rampant in Milton Park.

The study concludes, in a report entitled Caring for Milton Park, that the drug-dealing, violence and pimping that are harming vulnerable people on the streets are also harming vulnerable people who have a roof.

“Key stakeholders directly point to the increase in drug use on the streets, which insidiously infiltrates the non-profit housing and leads to relapses among sober tenants,” the report said.

“Episodes of violence, assaults involving vulnerable residents and property damage are multiplying.”

The presence of a homeless shelter, the report added, “is considered a factor that weakens vulnerable residents in non-profit housing.”

Moreover, the study found that residents perceive “a lack of proactivity on the part of the health and social services network” in dealing with the humanitarian crisis.

“‘ It would be great if the CIUSSS took a stand on street drugs,’” the report said, quoting one of the study’s participants.

“‘It’s a public health issue. It’s so big. The drug dealers are tempting tenants, and our buildings are being squatted by drug dealers.’”

The study was initiated by the Syndicat de copropriété de la Communauté Milton-Parc, led by Thibault, and the de la Montagne users’ committee. The latter represents patients and residents on the territory of the west-central CIUSSS, the CIUSSS du Centre-Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal.

The homeless people who go to Open Door are victims of drug trafficking.

Cathy Wong Plateau-Mont-Royal borough mayor

The researchers conclude that Milton Park has been abandoned by the health and social services system.

The only medical clinic in the neighbourhood closed in 2019. The province closed the nearby Royal Victoria and Hôtel-Dieu hospitals a decade ago.

Nearly 60 per cent of Milton Park residents surveyed for the study had no family doctor, compared to about 37 per cent for Montreal.

The study participants also pointed to insufficient services for homeless individuals, noting “there don’t appear to be any mental health and addiction services offered to them by the health-care system.”

In fact, residents expressed a desire for mental health and addiction services to be developed at the Open Door, “given that it is one of the few shelters that accepts people struggling with addiction.”

The study also found that bureaucracy impedes services in the neighbourhood.

Milton Park is assigned to a different health and social services territory than the rest of the Plateau borough, so the neighbourhood isn’t served by the CLSCs that are closest to it.

Since Milton Park belongs to the west-central CIUSSS, the CLSC that serves the neighbourhood is CLSC Métro, at Guy métro station. It’s two kilometres and four métro stops from the Milton-Parc intersection.

The rest of the Plateau belongs to the south-central CIUSSS, the CIUSSS du Centre-Sud-de-l’Île-de-Montréal, which has two CLSCs near Milton Park. One of the CLSCs is less than a 10-minute walk from the Milton-Parc intersection.

It’s possible that Milton Park was lumped into the west-central CIUSSS, which covers communities like Westmount, Town of Mount Royal, Parc-Extension and Côte-St-Luc, because of its large English-speaking population, the report said. The researchers were unable to find an explanation.

The west-central CIUSSS has acted on some of the Caring for Milton Park report’s recommendations. For example, it sent teams door-to-door in the neighbourhood from mid-December to mid-March to register vulnerable people on the wait list for a doctor, assess their health and psychosocial needs and provide them with information on how to receive services. The CIUSSS also set up mobile vaccination clinics in the neighbourhood this winter.

However, the CIUSSS says it isn’t responsible for opening doctors’ clinics, which are private businesses. And it declined the community’s request to open a satellite CLSC office in Milton Park. In a letter to Thibault and Phaneuf in March, the CIUSSS board said a specialized nurse practitioner clinic had been opened at CLSC Métro, “located near Milton Park.”

1969 black-and-white image of protesters fighting development in Milton Park.

The village, as Thibault calls it, feels like it’s under siege by the province and the city.

“We feel like we face a continuous headwind,” she said.

“I think there are bureaucrats in Quebec City, there are bureaucrats in Montreal and there are decision-makers who don’t know what the co-operative movement is.”

Montreal touts “off-market” and “transitional” housing as new solutions to the affordable housing crunch and homelessness in the city. But Milton Park is choking on high municipal taxes. Non-profit housing in some other provinces in Canada are tax-exempt.

In fact, the city recently dragged the Yellow Door to court to appeal the non-profit’s partial victory to have its property assessment — and therefore its tax bill — lowered. The Yellow Door lost the case in early May and is now filing an appeal.

At the provincial level, the Coalition Avenir Québec government has tabled legislation, Bill 20, that housing groups say attacks the viability of the province’s co-operative housing model.

The proposed law would take control away from housing co-ops to select their residents so the government can place people waiting for social housing in the buildings. Bill 20 would also financially penalize or evict existing co-op residents if their income rises above a low-income threshold used for social housing eligibility.

It’s like Quebec and Montreal need a history reminder.

The epic Milton Park citizens’ battle of the ’60s and ’70s began after residents learned that developer Concordia Estates Ltd. had bought up 96 per cent of the properties in the area and planned to raze it all for a complex of concrete highrises spanning six blocks.

Citizens organized themselves, demonstrated in the streets, occupied buildings that were slated for the wrecking ball and were arrested by helmeted riot police.

Only the first phase of La Cité was built in the economic downturn of the 70s, albeit at the expense of 255 buildings.

Architect Phyllis Lambert convinced a federal agency, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., to buy the remaining buildings so they could be renovated under the guidance of Heritage Montreal and returned to residents as co-ops and non-profit housing. The Quebec National Assembly passed a private bill officially creating the Milton Park Community in 1987.

Quebec reduced investment in new social housing construction from 2015 to 2017 and has drastically cut its investment since 2018.

The federal government withdrew completely from funding new social housing in the early ’90s, although it has re-engaged in the last decade.

Thibault contends that Montreal’s current affordable housing crisis wouldn’t be as grave as it is today had the governments maintained funding.

“It’s the governments’ fault for cutting off funding for co-op projects like Milton Park years ago,” she said.

“That’s the crux of the matter. If there had been more co-ops and non-profit housing developed in Quebec, we would not be in the situation we are currently in.”

Two Montreal police officers on patrol in the shopping mall Les Galeries du Parc.

During an unseasonably cold spring, “Crack Alley” looks like any back lane in Montreal.

But police constables Danny Chicoine and Alexandre Gaudet of Station 38 say that in the summer, the lane that runs behind a long-term care nursing home for seniors lives up to the nickname it was given by Milton Park residents.

In every season, Milton Park’s two permanent patrollers say they pass through the lane, between Parc and Jeanne-Mance St., two to three times a day, sometimes on bike and sometimes on foot. It’s one of many spots where they know to search for trouble.

“When you come from the direction of Milton, you have these beautiful hiding places,” Chicoine said during a foot patrol in March. He and Gaudet found the alley quiet at that moment.

Sheds, bins and brick walls along “Crack Alley” create hidden corners that are further obscured once summer arrives and greenery has grown in.

The officers’ tour invariably takes them through an office building and underground shopping mall Les Galeries du Parc, which are integrated into the La Cité complex but owned separately from the residential towers.

The officers come upon a small gathering in the men’s washroom known as a spot for drug consumption.

“If we pass by in five minutes, you’ll be done?” one of the officers asks a man by the sink.

The man agrees, adding: “I’m not dangerous.”

Police constable Danny Chicoine checks a stall in the men's bathroom at Les Galeries du Parc.

The patrols have brought the police closer to the realities of the neighbourhood, and they’re chipping away at a problem that seems to grow and mutate.

The mall’s underground parking garage had squatters living in abandoned cars until the officers told the mall manager to have the cars towed.

In April, Malo organized a training session for officers to respond to growing concern about sexual exploitation in the neighbourhood. The training was assisted by someone from the Indigenous community to help officers understand how to work with victims and understand their trauma so they can improve police interventions.

Malo said three factors account for what’s happening in Milton Park: the opioid crisis, the housing crisis and homelessness are on the rise.

“We will do everything we can to calm things down,” he said. “We are not going to solve the problem. People will understand. But we’ll bring it to a certain level that will be acceptable and everyone will be able to live safely in the area.”

The police deal with crime, but the circumstances that give rise to it require the involvement of many partners, Malo said.

Put simply, he said, “the less we have people who are addicted to these drugs, the less we’ll have people who sell (them).”

Antonia Caserta by the stove with a big pot of food, cooking 100 meals for poor members of the community at St. John's Lutheran Church in Milton Park.

On Fridays, the “Mother Teresa” of Milton Park is in a church basement on Jeanne-Mance cooking for 100 people. Caserta has volunteered for the Milton Park Food Bank for four years.

It’s one of at least 20 community organizations within Milton Park.

Caserta also volunteers for other food banks downtown, launched a meet-and-greet group last year for neighbours who feel isolated, and she’s currently working on organizing a choir and free dance lessons for the neighbourhood.

But even she says the Open Door has to go.

“I think at first people didn’t really know what to expect and I don’t think we were all opposed to it,” Caserta said of the shelter’s arrival.

“How the situation progressed, most people are very angry about it because it doesn’t seem like anyone can handle it. This is what we really hate about this. They brought so much criminality into our lives, into our neighbourhood.”

Maccarone, who has been the area’s MNA since 2018, said it’s “not normal” to invest heavily to maintain a shelter in a neighbourhood where there are no other support services.

“Right now, we’re investing so much money in policing and accompaniment services because the cohabitation isn’t working,” she said. The money, Maccarone said, could be spent on psychological support, addiction treatment and housing for homeless people.

But if Open Door leaves, will it really solve Milton Park’s problems?

Aliskandaria, the day camp co-ordinator, said he’s not convinced that the shelter’s departure alone would fix things, or even that all of its clientele would follow it to a new location.

But, he added, “I think they need to give the people what they want. Open Door has to leave, for the sake of the symbolism.”

Once the shelter is gone, he said, “we, Milton Park, are capable of organizing ourselves to find solutions.”

We will do everything we can to calm things down. We are not going to solve the problem.

Sylvain Malo Station 38 police commander

Recently, 17 community organizations in Milton Park formed a local Table de quartier, even though a Table de quartier already exists for Plateau-Mont-Royal. Milton Park has to deal with problems that don’t exist for the rest of the borough, Aliskandaria said.

Thibault, for one, said she’s encouraged by news that the Galeries du Parc and the connected 26-storey office tower and parking garage were sold in late April. The new owner has announced plans to “revitalize” the tower.

And in February, Wong agreed to a request from Milton Park residents to hold a town hall on the state of the neighbourhood. The borough mayor’s office says the event will be held with Station 38, possibly in late May or early June.

But right now, Thibault has her hands full with the dealer-infested building.

An application has been filed to evict the tenant from the upper-floor flat where the dealers have taken over, but the legal process is costly and takes time.

The building is home to “workers, students and people who are psychologically fragile,” Thibault said.

“It’s very difficult for them. We’re talking about people on low incomes. They can’t just move somewhere else. So they’re stuck.”

The building recently invested in a security camera and a new door entry system.

However, the dealers have already found a workaround, one of the neighbours said — they’re using a courier to deliver drugs instead of having clients come in.

Eviction is the only solution, the person said. It’s for the greater good, even if it adds another number to the statistics.

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