Housing crisis impacting Montrealers, with a look at how it affects the city’s Filipino community
Posted February 13, 2025 4:27 pm.
Last Updated February 25, 2025 11:45 am.
At a panel discussion on Wednesday, Concordia University students, advocates, and experts discussed cohabitation and homelessness tensions in Montreal – with the aim of finding better ways to address these issues.
“The solutions being proposed today, they center around housing commodification,” said Concordia University student and organizer Eve Xinidakis. “In other words, we’re looking at building housing solutions that are built for people and not for profit.”
The commodification of housing centers around the idea that housing is a commodity that can be bought and sold for profit, rather than a basic human right.
Some say these tensions are often due to judgement and negative perceptions — leaving many to become marginalized.
Xinidakis notes the event highlighted many inequities within housing, homelessness, and newcomer discrimination.
“There’s a bit of an irony here because even though a lot of people’s immigration status mean that they can’t even access buying a house, they often get blamed with being to blame for the housing crisis itself,” she said.
The discussion was hosted by students in the School of Community and Public affairs and Centre Kapwa, a community group that works with Filipino youth in Cote-des-Neiges – which says that the ongoing housing crisis has disproportionately affected Montreal’s Filipino community.
Concordia University student and organizer Jon Marvin Reyes noted that addressing homelessness and housing concerns are vital for the Filipino community.
“It’s really important for the Filipino community because this is the start to have the conversation, because again, we are all affected by it,” Reyes said.
“Most of the immigrants feel that we are being scapegoated or we’re being blamed for the housing crisis when it is in fact already existent well before our arrival.”
Last October, a poll commissioned exclusively for OMNI News by Leger found that nearly seven in 10 new Canadians think politicians were using immigration as a “red herring” to distract from other factors contributing to the lack of affordable housing, like government policies and economic conditions. Many newcomers and advocates said they felt unfairly blamed for the housing crisis.
The director of advocacy at Centre Kapwa, Veronica Jane Bertiz, says many Filipino people are being priced out of the Côte-des-Neiges area following Montreal’s plan of acquiring 700 units across 30 apartment buildings.
The more than 700 housing units are expected to cost $103 million, with the goal of helping protect vulnerable households and affordable housing.
“Those units that they have acquired for low social income is actually in the area in Côte-des-Neiges where a lot of Filipinos are living,” Bertiz said. “Côte-des-Neiges area is also a university area so a lot of students are also coming over and pushing out multigenerational families in our communities.
“If we don’t have housing, it’s a bit hard for us to actually catch our breath. It’s very important for our community to be aware of what’s happening.”
Panelists brought the attention to housing topics like urban cohabitation, and exploring the root causes of the housing crisis, with the goal of paving the way that sees housing justice for all in Montreal.
“We really want to bring that stigma that homeless people is not always jobless, homeless people are not always violent,” Reyes said.
“Housing is something that brings people to talk about things like homelessness. It brings people to talk about things like immigration,” said Faiz Abhuani, the founder of Parc Extention housing non-profit Brique Par Brique.
“It brings people to talk about things like poverty and inequality and the future of the city.”
