[00:00]
Alia: Like many centrally located neighbourhoods in Montreal, Chinatown is faced with a worsening housing crisis that has contributed to an increase in visible homelessness, public drug use, and some forms of petty crime, creating real cohabitation challenges. At the same time, it’s facing intense real estate pressure as property becomes more and more valuable.
Orlando: [Translation from spoken French] These structural issues are creating various degrees of real and perceived insecurity in Chinatown. As we've discussed in previous episodes, an increased police presence does not improve any of these issues, while deeply worsening the insecurity faced by unhoused folks and other vulnerable community members.
Alia: Chinatown is a place where conversations around « safety » are causing internal divisions.
City News [0:18-0:28] Operation Gold Dragon was launched in Montreal's Chinatown on Thursday, a pilot project in response to public safety concerns there, encouraging people to report crime.
City News [0:00-0:07] The situation is becoming more critical than ever. Violence is coming back, so is disorder.
City News [2:13-2:15] It's time to take back our streets and our neighbourhood.
City News [0:28- 0:45] Chinatown residents and community leaders say they've seen an increase of violence, drug-trafficking, harassment, vandalism, and homelessness in the area, with encampments around complexe Guy-Favreau. The project is spearheaded by the Center for Research-Action on Race Relations.
City News [2:21-2:26] We need to be harder on things that are criminal acts. And we are very soft on crime.
City News [1:38- 1:54] To address this situation, the Chinatown community groups have outlined six measures aimed at reducing threats to public safety, that include an increased police presence, a zero-tolerance by the police to drug trafficking and consumption, as well as better lighting in the neighbourhood.
Alia: Over the past year, some members of the Chinatown community have been campaigning to demand an increased police presence in the neighbourhood, and a crack down on homelessness and drug use.
Orlando: This repressive campaign uses the language of crime, violence, and chaos, creating a fearful and divisive landscape that obscures the real and long standing structural issues that frame urban security concerns.
Alia: Recently, this repressive campaign has actually exacerbated the housing crisis by eliminating infrastructure that supports unhoused people in the neighbourhood by closing a homeless shelter and dismantling encampments. Ultimately, leaving more people living on the street.
Orlando: In the face of this urban safety crisis, many people in Chinatown are rejecting the campaign for more police. Instead, they are fighting for a non-violent approach to safety in Chinatown that denounces the systems that create and criminalize poverty.
Alia: Today we’re joined by Maka and Wawa, two activists, who are part of this fight. In our conversation, we discuss how pro-police narratives criminalize poverty, create community divisions, and justify punitive measures. We also examine how this struggle comes up against questions of neighbourhood identity, gentrification, and our capacity to build solidarity with our neighbours. By challenging this false sense of security, we expose how the language of safety is weaponized against the marginalized, equating safety with state violence, and obscuring the repressive structures that harm the very people it claims to protect.
[03:20]
Alia: You’re listening to Brûler/Bâtir, a podcast about reimagining collective safety!
Karl: Brûler (burn down)… because the police perpetuate violence and are a failed approach to safety.
Alia: Bâtir (build up)… because we can invest in, and amplify, systems of care, justice, and safety without policing.
Karl: Every month, we talk to people working to build real safety in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke, and hear about how the lice get in the way.
Alia: I’m Alia
Karl: I’m Karl.
Alia : And we’re gonna be your hosts.
[03:44]
Alia: Everybody can start by introducing yourselves. Maybe you could both tell us a little bit about how you became involved in organizing and advocacy in Chinatown. Karl isn't with us today, so Orlando is joining us.
Orlando: My name is Orlando. I've been organizing with defund for a couple of years. I did some interludes in some of the prior episodes, and I also do some research on mixed squads in Montreal.
Maka: I'm Maka. I joined the Chinatown scene in 2018 when I learned about the group Progressive Chinese Quebecers. I am a non-Chinese person but I joined this group because it was aligned with my values on anti-Asian racism and anti-racism in general. Soon after, the Chinatown Working Group was formed out of Progressive Chinese Quebecers. I focused my energy there. In 2021, I made the Instagram page, “My Chinatown Montreal” and started posting about gentrification issues and other struggles related to anti-Asian racism. And now I think I'm more known for my community building by hosting Mahjong games in Chinatown.
Wawa: Hi I'm Wawa. Vis-a-vis Chinatown, I wear many hats. First and foremost, I'm just a concerned daughter and niece that has family members living in Chinatown. My community organizing started with the patrimonial designation. With the Chinatown working group, we did the work to get Chinatown recognized as a patrimonial site, and that was all amid the anti-Asian hate movement and through all the different activist groups that were created in Chinatown ever since. I'm now part of the Housing Rights and Urban Planning Committee affiliated with the Chinatown Roundtable, and I work with Maka on “My Chinatown Montreal”. I'm also a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and I'm currently working on a film documenting the rise of police presence in the neighbourhood of Chinatown and documenting the field work. So I think it's important to say that I don't do activism because I'm a passionate activist. I do it out of necessity. If I could, I'm just a girl, and I'd be having fun outside.
Orlando: Can you maybe tell us a little more about Chinatown and especially about your personal relationship and experience of the neighbourhood.
Wawa: My relationship with Chinatown starts with families: a very direct relationship with the people. I was an artist commissioned by the city to do an art piece in Chinatown for the Asian night market in 2022. I was put in a position where I had to do an art piece for the outside community coming into Chinatown to enjoy the space as a tourist, so I was rendering a touristic perspective of Chinatown which is a perspective I've never had. This is actually the moment where I realized that I was not doing the art piece for my auntie, or I was not doing the art piece for my mom, and even when my parents came to the inauguration I felt this distance. There is a poignant difference between the living community and the external community. This is where it all started for me.
Maka: For me as a Vietnamese person, I had family go to Chinatown for a lot of Asian foods because growing up in Montreal, there wasn't a lot of access to Asian foods besides in Chinatown or Côte-Vertu or the St. Laurent area. And we went to Chinatown a lot to kind of just eat food, go to dim sum, and during that time food was a way for us to gather together. But for me, I saw the neighbourhood had two faces: it's like a tourist trap, as Wawa was saying, or rather the overconsumption of what it looks like to be Asian, so food and bubble tea, and then the other face is this multifaceted and complex history of struggle and resistance from gentrification and the uprooting of locals. Like besides the bubble tea and the food, there's actual people, living and breathing people, just existing here.
[07:50] A Brief History of Struggle in Today’s Chinatown
Alia [voiceover] : Since it was first settled by Chinese migrants at the end of the 19th century, Chinatown has been a working class immigrant neighbourhood.
Wawa: I think one thing that is important to remember from Chinatown is that Chinatown's history is marked by struggle and precarity. The community organized and we developed kinship systems through family associations and clan associations. They still exist. So it's like all of this ecosystem is how China was built.
See Maka’s Zine: Connecting two Communities
Alia [voiceover] : In 2019, in the face of accelerated gentrification efforts, the Chinatown Working Group was formed to protect, promote, and preserve the history and living culture of Montreal’s Chinatown and its communities.
Wawa: So in the Chinatown working group where me and Maka met and worked together for the first time we advocated for the patrimonial designation of Chinatown as a site.
Maka: The patrimonial designation is supposed to protect the buildings in Chinatown from redevelopment into condos or demolition. It’s meant to preserve the buildings and keep them as is. So like a heritage house. Heritage houses are an example of patrimonial designations. People live in heritage houses, and if you renovate them you have to renovate it in a way that preserves the structure of the house.
***
Wawa: Yeah, so the fight is not over after the patrimonial designation. It actually just started. I think there's a part where now people are kind of sitting on the patrimonial designation as if it was a victory and it's done. Chinatown's safe. You save the buildings, but there’s people living in them. There’s a living community. We had more attention on Chinatown, and that was perfect. And a lot of opportunities grew out of this, like the round table.
Alia [voiceover] : In 2022, after this patrimonial designation was won, the working group advocated for the creation of the Chinatown Roundtable.
Wawa: The round table is a multi sectoral platform, which is aiming to create conversations within the different sectors in Chinatown.
[09:43]
Alia: Today, we're mostly going to center a conversation around questions of urban security in Chinatown. Recently, some community members have been running a sort of repressive campaign that demands an increase in police presence as well as a crackdown on homelessness and drug use. So maybe just to start, both of you can maybe talk a bit about this campaign?
Maka: So in Chinatown, there's a few folks who are calling for more police presence to crack down on homelessness and drug use and crime.
Wawa: The way that we're framing our stance is we are with the voices that are demanding solutions for the urban security concerns and issues, but we're not for the solutions that they're proposing. We tackle systemic problems and eradicating poverty rather than tackling crimes and disorder narratives because they are only a symptom of the larger socio-economic crises that we are in.
Maka: One of the things that they've been implementing is this helpline where you submit a crime that you witnessed. So you scan a QR code and then you submit whatever you saw and then it's sent to a Gmail account. And then from there, it's supposed to build up a report so that they can then go to the police and be like, “look, there's been multiple accounts of crime happening on this street”. They're trying to criminalize unhoused status, and that includes daily maintenance, like going to the bathroom for instance. They see the police as a means to be able to punish these folks, and that's kind of where we disagree. We want to be able to say, “hey, cops aren't the solution to this”, or that “You have more in common with unhoused people than you do with people who own lots of amounts of property”. Ironically, this group of people wants to create a roundtable with stakeholders that include Guy-Favreau building owners, the Palais des Congrès, the hotels around Chinatown, which are gentrifying and have gentrified Chinatown. They’re teaming up with the people who made Chinatown shrink because before those places existed, there were houses there—buildings that housed people. Make it make sense, you know!
Alia: Well, what's happening in Chinatown is happening everywhere, even places with different cultural complexities. We're seeing an increase in homelessness and we're also seeing an increase in hostility to ideas of who belongs in public spaces, and who's allowed to use public spaces. And like you're saying, they're making it illegal for people to exist at all if you don't have access to private property. It sounds like this campaign is trying to narrativize the state of Chinatown, what disorder means, and what safety means, while it's also trying to create certain solutions. And I think in this conversation, we're going to try to create a different narrative about what is actually going on and what might be a solution to those problems.
[12:54] A Brief History of Policing in Chinatown
Orlando [voiceover]: So there's this group of folks who really want more police presence in Chinatown, and another group who thinks the police are only going to bring more harm into the neighborhood. In between them, there's the entire Chinatown community who, like many communities, has a complex relationship with the police.
Maka: From my understanding, the police have always been asked to be promoted in Chinatown. But then there was a recent event that happened where a cop actually killed a member of the Chinese community. Ronnie Kay was shot by the cops and it sent a shock into the community, so a lot of members have shifted their perspective to the role of cops now.
CTV News [0:00-0:13]: A year ago, a member of Montreal's Chinese community was shot dead by police during an intervention in Nun's Island. The circumstances of the tragedy have yet to be made public, despite the family's demand for justice.
CTV News [0:43-0:51]: We need an explanation of why we lost one of the most active, youth committed, engaged, uh, members of the community.
CTV News [1:28-1:40] : Kay's relatives held protests denouncing that not a single representative of the Montreal police has come forward with an apology or offered any sympathy.
Orlando [voiceover]: In the last couple of years. Chinatown has also been targeted by the RCMP Canada's national police. Community groups are currently suing the RCMP for reparations.
Maka: So, the RCMP lawsuit that we're filing is about how the RCMP has allegedly labeled Chinese Family Services in Québec as police stations for the Chinese government, which is not true. We filed this lawsuit to say that you caused us damages, such as a complete defunding of the resources for the community centers that have helped people, for employment issues for instance. And then post-COVID, grants that they were giving used to offer French lessons too. So they got funding from provincial governments and from investors, but once they were labeled as police stations their funding was cut.
CTV News [0:00-0:13]: Two Chinese community centers in the Montreal area are planning to sue the RCMP. The RCMP alleged they were hosting clandestine Chinese police stations. The center is now seeking 2. 5 million in damages.
CTV News [0:59-1:13]: We've been asking for a long time like what is the evidence against us? The interviews with the board members. We heard zero, zero, zero.
Alia: Sites of community strength have been actively torn apart, and it's also interesting to me how you are drawing a direct link between the way that the police force, the military force, has caused direct disinvestment in community resources. There seems like a very important relationship there and the fact that there's this new trust now in the police coming in seems to stand in pretty direct disagreement with what the community has felt to be true about the ways that they've been treated.
Wawa: The thing is, one of the ways that shows that the system and the state know that this discrepancy exists is that they are now doing a lot of copaganda in Chinatown, and this is something that I witnessed from the perspective of a family member. You know, during the heat wave that we had a few weeks ago, one of my aunties posted on Facebook a pamphlet that the police were putting on everyone's door: “heat wave, drink water, wear light clothes, call your close friends and have a nice day”. We're here for you. If we don't understand as a group on the ground that there's a discrepancy between the groups and interest, the state understands it and they see potential in the marginalized groups.
*** [16:41]
Orlando [voiceover]: Community Policing is a trend in North American policing, where the police claim to work in prevention by inserting police officers into communities, schools, hospitals, etc. — ostensibly in an attempt to rebuild trust with the community. In reality, community policing has always served to expand police repression -- it gave the police more money, more power, and it put a lot more cops on the streets. You can listen to our first episode, on the policing of homelessness, for a more in-depth conversation on this policing trend.
Maka: There was a booth in Chinatown where these pro police folks were trying to promote more policing in Chinatown, and in doing that, they invited the police into Chinatown to talk to residents to say, “look we're doing everything we can to prevent crime”.
Wawa: And there was this tent, SPVM in the middle, and there were colouring books for kids, and a lot of little goodies with the SPVM label on it. It was a very cute branding thing, and Defund was there to provide alternatives, so we really understand that there's so many complexities and things to unpack, and we want to have empathy in the way that we respond, but more reciprocal. So we're just distributing pamphlets to the people that would come out from the booth. I was coming with my camera because I wanted to document this for my documentary, and she was like, no, you can't document this. Then we talked, we talked, we talked, and then we kind of found that she was really validating my point. She was like, “yeah, the police can't do this all on its own”. We need funding for mental health institutions. We need money also in the community stream. I was like, “Maka, they know this, maybe we can actually work with them!” And she's, like, “No, Wawa, you fell in the trap!”
Maka: The cop was even agreeing with us that there's seldom solutions to things and the polices and the answers, so that entire interaction kind of sent us spiraling a little because we were like, “wow, the cops actually agree with us”. Like are we becoming reformists? What's happening? And then, of course we rationalized ourselves out of that mentality, but it was weird to see the police agreeing with us, even though we were there to be like, “Hey, the police are not the answer”.
Orlando: I find it really interesting because it's actually quite common that the police will agree with those things. They love to say, “we can't solve these problems, this is not really our job,” but then at the same time, they're still the ones that are mobilizing these fear mongering campaigns that are going to make everybody ask for more police in the neighbourhood. But also if they're doing this booth, it means that they're very invested in this campaign as well. It raises the question of: A. why has this campaign been so successful in a way, even though it's such a small group of people pushing forward, and B, why are the police so eagerly involved in this campaign and collaborating so much and putting so many resources to push this campaign forward? Maybe the answer is just, well, you know, the people that are pushing the campaign forward are powerful and wealthy, and they have influence with the city, and the influence of the media, and their demands are demands that the city is really happy to say yes to. Whereas if you're asking for more social housing, more senior housing, no one would care, right?
[19:59]
Alia: It seems the way you've been speaking about the history of Chinatown, and the community that exists right now, is that there's a very large group of people who've been there for a long time, who are Chinese, who have suffered from, difficult housing conditions, neglect from the state, and there's a way that there could be solidarity formed by the ways that the state is targeting homeless people now, and how they neglected to support members of the community. And I guess I'm curious if this police campaign seems to be creating lack of mobilization between these groups, or if that's new? Is it old?
Wawa: Yeah, unfortunately it's not building solidarity, not in the way that is collective, but it's building solidarity within those who really want to root for the capitalist aspect of the neighbourhood. In my documentary, the one thing that I'm trying to make is connections. I'm talking to different groups that don't really talk to one another. They all agree on the fact that when you call the police, they're insufficient. They always come two hours later, or when they come they don't do anything. Everyone agrees, everyone agrees on the same problems, everyone agrees on the same solution, everyone knows the police are not sufficient, but they don't talk to one another. Two of the cases that I'm documenting are actually the field work that we do with the Urban Planning and Housing Rights Committee. We're monitoring rooming houses. Well, more specifically right now, our focus is on two rooming houses. There's one on Clark where everyone loves to call it “the crack alley of Chinatown”. This one has been victim of landlord neglect. We've been monitoring it for a year already. We have witnessed the changing of landlord situations, ghost landlords who don't really exist, and we've never seen their faces or anything. Monitoring this, talking often with their tenants that are living there, and, of course, the police not doing much here. The other rooming house that we're monitoring is owned by shop owners in the neighbourhood too, and we're checking on the situation for them not to be evicted and everything.
[22:01]
Maka [voiceover]: Rooming houses are a form of housing accessible to lower-income individuals, including precarious workers and seniors living on small pensions. They consist of buildings with individual rooms and shared common areas such as kitchens and bathrooms. Once prevalent, rooming houses have mostly been converted into expensive housing or lost for various reasons. Rooming houses are often serving as the last affordable housing option before potential homelessness. Individuals who are illegally evicted or forced out face daunting challenges in securing new housing, particularly after long-term residency. The legacy of rooming houses in Chinatown is significant. Originally run by family associations, these rooming houses played a crucial role in the neighborhood's early development. In Chinatown, seniors and workers may encounter additional hurdles like language barriers when displaced, affecting their access to community and culturally appropriate resources. Currently, four rooming houses in Chinatown provide affordable residences for low-income workers, seniors of Chinese descent, and others in the neighbourhood. Privately-owned affordable housing, such as rooming houses, face increasing threats from real estate speculators. This vulnerability leaves tenants at risk of eviction. Rooming houses in the Ville-Marie borough are technically protected from conversion into other housing types, but effective enforcement depends on vigilant oversight. To ensure rooming houses continue serving their intended purpose, the city or a non-profit organization must purchase these buildings. Moving forward, it is crucial to prevent private investors from acquiring these properties.
Wawa: When we talk about crack alley, rather than just pointing at the situation and focusing on the emotions, it's about, who is responsible for this situation? Is it the drug dealers really? Is it the users or it's a neglectful landlords and neglectful city? You know, when the merchants say, “They break our windows and they defecate in front of our things, we really don't feel safe, they break things. They steal things.” It's like, yeah, I hear you. Honestly, it sucks, but, you know that there's an OD every month or so that is mostly the unhoused populations and the more victimized that are really suffering, as in they're actually dying from all these things. So when we talk about the people that are victimized in this situation, who is it? And these are the things that I'm trying to bring to the forefront when we talk about urban security issues.
Alia: This is something we return to a lot is this idea of safety versus discomfort. I think shop owners often are like, it might be inconvenient, it might be a little uncomfortable to deal with like all of the things that happen when people are living lives and have to depend on the street to have their needs met, but it's very different than your life being literally at threat every day. I mean, these business owners are often really successful at making it seem like what they're fighting for is a safe Chinatown for everybody, when what they're really fighting for is a landscape that is clean, not necessarily safe, and that will make tourism attractive, that will make moving through the city for affluent people easy, never inconvenient, never uncomfortable.
We're taught to think as liberalist individuals that we are entitled to having a dignified experience in the city where we don't have to even see that poverty and inequality exists.
Wawa: Exactly!
Orlando: Yeah, and also to add to that, the merchants’ focus on their own problems is to be expected, but there's this bigger structural problem where they have economic power, they have political power, they have access to the media, and that's why they're able to push a successful campaign that's entirely centered around their own interests. Whereas unhoused people, drug users, don't have that political power, and they're completely dehumanized by the culture overall. They don't have access to the media, they don't have economic power, and therefore, they're not able to push forward a political campaign to defend their interests, and to the extent that they are is because there are people like you and people that are organizing that are building that political power and that political response. I wonder also if something that's happening within the community is that you have low income people, renters, who have many things probably that they're frustrated about because they've been neglected and abandoned, as you said, but they're not able to push forward those concerns because they also don't have that much power, right? So then when there's a campaign that's seemingly powerful and successful, and that's sort of pushing forward one of their concerns, obviously they're going to latch on to it and support it because at least it's addressing one thing that they would like to address and then maybe they're not going to be thinking that much about whether it's addressing in the perfect way. At the end of the day, if that's the only way to push something forward, then better that than nothing, right? And it's so important that you two are creating that alternative. That political alternative that says “if you guys are concerned, maybe you can support our campaign instead”, you know, because we're fighting for something bigger. Something like that's good for all of us.
Wawa: We're more holistic, yeah. When the folks are asking for more policing, they're pushing this idea that there are activities that are crimes, and the activities that need to be repressed and need to be punished. The thing is, what they don't understand is those crimes and those activities that they're talking about, they're a direct result of poverty, as the girls fromWoke or Whatever were saying about their episode on funding. Shout out to them actually, such a good podcast. They were saying how, “well if you eradicate poverty and you eradicate the conditions in which the people are doing those crimes, there wouldn't be no crimes”. So these are the questions that we're trying to ask in order to reframe this whole thing. And what I want to add is when I talk to the tenants that are living in the rooming houses, they know very well that the police are not the answer. When I was talking to one of the cooks of the buffet, he's working in three of those restaurants, just moving around for these people are really running that fucking neighborhood. They don't have time to talk about these things, but they know very well.
[28:24]
Orlando: Something I found very worrying in this whole sort of repressive pro police campaign is that it seems like race was being mobilized in order to push this repressive demands and in particular, I've seen in the media, that the Center for Research Action on Race Relations has been heavily involved in this campaign, and they're a centre that historically fights against racial discrimination, from what I understand, and they fought a lot of racial profiling cases. So the fact that they're involved makes it seem, at least in the media, that this story is about a sort of marginalized, racialized community, and the fact that there's so much homelessness in the neighborhood is a sign of the discrimination against us, which as you've talked about, is related to this abandonment and this neglect, so there's truth to that. However, these truths are then used to demand that you bring the policing, and that's how you prove that you respect us, and that the city respects us as minorities.
Maka: There's a need to discuss race in terms of class analysis, and that's what we're trying to do. Not call them out, but we're trying to point out to them that this is what they're doing to work with stakeholders that own property or have property in Chinatown and hotels and Palais de Congres and Guy Favreau. These places, again, gentrified Chinatown in the first place. So the fact that they're working with or wanting to work with these people, including the police when CRARR has been notorious for pointing out systemic racism in how the police treat people. Target marginalized people.
I want to point out that this is what's happening in New York right now. They're trying to build a mega jail in the center of New York City, and it's interesting because there's a lot of Asians who are fighting against this, but there's also a lot of Asians who were bribed into supporting this. So that's why we need that class analysis, because if you follow this Instagram page called Youth Against Displacement they talk about this a lot on their page. MOCA, the Museum of Chinese Americans, focuses on shedding light on racism and racist laws that happened to Chinese Americans in the past. But now they're contributing to this divide in class between the workers in Chinatown and with people who own property, because thought I don't know what the layout is in Chinatown, New York's Chinatown, but essentially there are people being bribed into supporting this jail, and this jail is being built in Chinatown.
Alia: This is connected to so many things, and we're seeing this on a global scale right now. Race is mobilized by the powers that be when convenient for their political agenda. So you know, anti-semitism is being combatted by the state right now everywhere because it's convenient for their own demands to support Israel. But when anti-semitism is not inconvenient for them, when it's equally as violent or much more violent to Jewish people, it hasn’t been combatted. And I think this is happening here because where was the state support historically for all of these people in Chinatown? It's being mobilized right now because it coincides with the cities’ agendas to gentrify Chinatown. It could be a source of revenue. We are hesitant if you want to make this point, but there are lots of debates about how racial categories are constructed and what race means and what’s an intersectional definition of race, but one way you can think about race is it's constructed over time. It's a category about group differentiation and what makes race real in one extent is state neglect. Race isn't just this thing that is outside of structures of empowerment or disempowerment. It is those structures.
I think they would like to make it seem like in Canada, race is just the color of your skin. That's what race is. It's just this thing that has no relationship to economic challenges.
Orlando: In Chinatown, Montreal, the neglect that a lot of people have suffered and the disempowerment that they've suffered, including the women houses, is very much racialized. There's a reason why Chinatown has been neglected and that’s partly for reasons of racism, and now it's worrying because all of a sudden, race is being mobilized, but not to improve the conditions for everyone, but just to advance like the narrow project of some interests. Some of them are from the community, some are not.
Alia: And it might increase the revenue of some Chinese business owners. It's not to say it's only going to benefit white people or something.
Maka: I came across this term called race laundering where people in power use other people's race as a means to push their agenda. At what point are you a mouthpiece to white supremacy? And how is your race weaponized in a way to justify these acts?
[33:34]
Alia: We've talked on the show a lot about safety as a collective project. What does creating a safer Chinatown for everyone look like?
Wawa: One of them is simply work with the borough and the city to facilitate renting and renting out the commercial housing on Clark street for affordable prices and focus more on social housing.
Tackling the problem of abandoned buildings and turning them into something that can be used for this, to serve one of these crises that we're in, like homelessness overdose or mental health. Doing something with these spaces because these spaces are vacant, and they allow more insecurity. So that's a few things. Funding more and more of the community activities that can serve the living community and another thing that we asked for in one of the demands is funding the current Chinatown roundtable that temporarily create resources and workshops
I think having some simple pamphlets that explain, how do we cohabitate? What do you do when you see these types of crises? Because, you know, the work that we do in the rooming houses is like social working jobs, work that we’re doing to monitor the situation and we're not equipped to tackle mental health crises. We also asked to pressure the landlord of the abandoned building on Clark Street to stop blocking the development of social housing, and as long as abandoned buildings dominate Clark Street, insecurity issues and all these things will prevail. Bottom line: if you want to tackle urban security, you're going to have to tackle poverty, not crimes. Cause if you eradicate poverty, you eradicate crimes.
Maka: Yeah, and many people have demonstrated interest in saving Chinatown, whatever that looks like for them. But to us, the first step is to have an understanding of the neighbourhood that is tied to the material conditions away from the Orientalist concept that the mainstream media depicts. Chinatown, as we mentioned, it's a site of struggle and we’re always keeping in mind that because we can't rely on the media to enhance the voices of the most marginalized, we want the four streets of what's happening in Chinatown to reflect the systemic crisis that the city is in. And only towards them, towards the city can we point our fingers to other solutions. So more social housing, more funding for healthcare, and offering safe supply.
Wawa: So rather than pointing fingers to any groups, just point the fingers to the city, and raise your hands to the voices of the most marginalized.
[36:50]
Karl: Brûler Bâtir is produced by … Alia, Karl, Abby, Zo, and Orlando.
Alia: Big thanks to Wawa and Maka for joining us this month. For updates on their organizing you can follow @mychinatownmtl on instagram.
Alia: Our outro song is by Kimmortel off their new album Shoebox. We do this work in Tiohtià:ke on the unceded lands of the Kanien'kehá:ka.
Karl: Share and subscribe!
Alia: The struggle for community safety is ongoing so stay tuned.
Karl: Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
This interview transcript was edited by Lorenzo Carrara