Hundreds of housing activists and their supporters have occupied a section of Montreal’s Parc Lafontaine, where a Tent City has been constructed. Hundreds of people continue to occupy the site, enjoying food, drinks, conversation and music, while others are erecting tents and tarps and arranging the site. Meanwhile, at Guindonville in the Laurentians, resistance to the razing of low-cost homes continues. one resident has settled on her roof, ready to attach herself to a 600 pound barrel of concrete to prevent any sort of police intervention.

MONTREAL, July 5, 2003 (7:05pm) – On a muggy and hot mid-summer afternoon, hundreds of housing activists and their supporters have occupied a section of Montreal’s Parc Lafontaine, where a Tent City has been constructed. Hundreds of people continue to occupy the site, enjoying food, drinks, conversation and music, while others are erecting tents and tarps and arranging the site. A pirate radio station is broadcasting about the Tent City (104.9fm in Montreal), and a Tent City website is online, with web streaming and updated information(http://tentcity.taktic.org). A general assembly of Tent City participants is planned for tomorrow, and a full schedule of workshops and activities are planned for the entire week.

The Montreal police have made three announcements with a special sound truck, reminding Tent City participants of various municipal by-laws: parks must close at midnight, no outdoor fires are permitted, and tents are not allowed to be erected in public parks. Police vans and cars are located nearby the Tent City site, but have not intervened. A potential intervention is possible if the police decide to enforce the municipal park closure by-law or remove tents.

Today’s action -- organized jointly by the Comité des sans-emploi, CLAC Logement and the Housing Committee of Ahuntsic-Cartierville -- is in response to Montreal’s housing crisis, which is marked by vacancy rates of less than 1%, increasing gentrification of formerly low-cost working class areas, as well as increasing homelessness. Every July, hundreds of Montreal residents with expired leases are rendered homeless by the lack of affordable housing, while potentially thousands more are forced into substandard or unaffordable apartments.

The Tent City organizers have three principal demands: Decent housing for all; the end of the criminalization of poverty and homelessness; and the repossession of empty buildings for community use. They are stressing the anti-capitalist nature of their action, critiquing the root causes of the housing crisis in Montreal. According to a flyer being passed out at the Tent City (“Decent Housing for Everyone