Gentrification

I wasn’t there on Aberdeen or Locke that night. I don’t know who was, and I’m not interested in knowing who was. I don’t necessarily think it was the most strategic or timely action in Hamilton’s history of resistance, but I certainly don’t condemn it. Far from it. I think it was brave, I think it was well-executed, and I think it was a meaningful and justified act of political action against a neighbourhood that sits way too comfortably on a mountain of unearned privileges, and that flamboyantly basks in the luxuries afforded by a destructive and exploitative system. ...

Inspired by the riots in Hamburg, we burned two luxury cars outside of a condo in St-Henri during the night of July 13. In a neighbourhood where people have to choose between food and rent, don’t be surprised when we set fire to your flagrant displays of class privilege. We used a simple method: fire sticks half-covered in fire-paste. All the material can be found in a camping store. We lit the fire-paste covered end and placed it in the top corners of the car’s grill, between the headlights. We used two sticks per car. The fire is mostly invisible until plastic or motor oil catches fire, giving you time to leave unseen. Be careful: the fire can easily spread to cars parked close-by. ...

The buzz has become impossible to escape. Business associations speak of “renewal”, while expensive restaurants celebrate “revitalization” and local politicians promote “redevelopment” as the city gives large grants to Toronto entrepreneurs to set up shop in town. This is all accompanied by a media blitz presenting Hamilton as a land of opportunity for the rich. With every passing day the meaning of these words becomes painfully obvious – in practice they really just mean increased misery, hardship, and displacement. Real estate agents, property management firms, investors, and business owners amongst others, reap huge profits as many of us who have called Hamilton home struggle to get by in the changing city. This is a fundamental reality of capitalism and is not surprising. What is surprising, is that those who celebrate and profit off gentrification continue to do so openly without regularly feeling the anger of those who their narrow self-interest harms. ...

As rising housing prices push more of us into difficult situations here in Hamilton, it can be hard to find inspiration for how to fight back against gentrification. But just down the 401, anarchists in Montreal have been developing a practice of direct action against businesses involved in gentrifying their neighbourhoods over the past several years. Focused on Hochelaga in the east and Saint-Henri in the south-west, a variety of strategies have emerged that share a common goal of making the territory inhospitable for businesses that try to attract a rich clientele to working-class areas. ...

Just over a year ago, a masked crowd looted the yuppie grocery store attached to the “3734” restaurant on Notre-Dame street and redistributed the food to people in the neighborhood, one of dozens of actions against gentrification in recent years. The grocery store shut down several months ago, but we noticed that the 3734 restaurant was still serving business lunches and expensive dinners to local yuppies. So last Wednesday night we paid them a visit, breaking a window and covering the inside of the restaurant with paint, using a fire extinguisher. ...

On the night of May 19, we decided to come together to attack the restaurant and bar Ludger, the offices of Projet Montréal, and the IGA supermarket in Saint-Henri. If we attacked Ludger, it’s not only to denounce the over-priced meals that they serve, but to attack the way of life of young professional yuppies who invade popular neighbourhoods with their cash, and contribute to the exclusion of the poor in the neighbourhood. ...

This winter, I visited New York City, where I attended a really inspiring Black Lives Matter demonstration called the People’s Monday March. They employed a tactic I’ll call Business Invasion, which allows a small number of people to deliver a political message in a way that cannot be ignored. The day after that action, I wrote a reportback, which forms the first half of this article. The second half is reflections on how this tactic could be used by anarchists to fight gentrification in Montreal. ...

On March 15, 2017, a dozen or so condo owners in Saint-Henri dug their cars out from under the biggest snowfall of the winter, only to learn that their tires had been slashed while they slept. We carried out this simple action on the eve of the 20th annual Protest Against Police Brutality, in Hochelaga, to emphasize that the struggle against policing and the struggle against gentrification are one and the same: the creation of a world hostile to social control and all forms of domination. ...

Download and Print Here We’d like to respond with our thoughts to a text Mise en Commun (Putting in Common) that has been circulated critiquing insurrectionary projects and perspectives in Montreal. We appreciate that the authors of Mise en Common want to elaborate similarities and clarify differences, and move past bad faith. We’re taking this as an occasion to respond and to clarify ideas that we’ve been reflecting on for a few years now. We’ll try to use points of difference with Mise en Commun as an opportunity to delve further into ideas and how they inform practices, rather than limiting the scope of our text to simply addressing the critiques. We recognize that the length of this text might not facilitate a simple back-and-forth with the original authors, but our goal is to contribute to a larger discussion about these questions. We hope others will feel compelled to participate in this process of clarifying ideas and directions. ...

We’re hoping to engage in a dialogue we have until now chosen to avoid. The cliques rub shoulders with each other, but struggle sometimes to communicate and often don’t speak the same language, in either words or gestures. The present text is about making clear what we have in common and what separates us. Certain unaddressed tensions have lead to far too much shit-talking, gossip, bad faith remarks, half-reflections, and security breaches. Some people want to see in these sometimes vehement exchanges simply interpersonal conflicts, but this understanding empties all political content of the critiques thus put forward. To avoid that all this be reduced to gossip and late-night debates, we want to identify the lines of tension, to politically name the points of rupture and look for which ways we can collectively grow more powerful. Our intention here isn’t to “denounce” certain practices or to discourage friends from reproducing them, but to avoid the fetishization of smashing windows and to constantly and collectively reflect the benefits and costs of our actions. ...

A few minutes after the business closed, a surveillance camera captured a masked individual writing some hardly flattering graffiti. For the owner, Stéphane Allard, there is no doubt that it was a planned, anti-gentrification action. “You see four individuals pass by with a backpack. Then you see a masked person write hateful graffiti”, explains Mr. Allard, who estimates he lost an entire day of work. ...