Article content continued

During the 45-minute talk, Wesley and Pagé, executive director of Montreal addictions treatment centre Dopamine, argued that crack houses perform valuable services in cities that often can’t be replicated by social service organizations.

They said crack houses are places to buy and use drugs. But they are also places to live for people whose lifestyles prohibit them from staying in shelters or social housing.

Crack houses are also social and business hubs, places where social service and health-care providers can reliably find and assist people, and often the only places some people can go to warm up in the winter.

The talk highlighted a project to save a rooming house where dozens of people lived off and on in Montreal’s low-income Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood.

Photo by Ian Kucerak / Ian Kucerak/Edmonton Sun/QMI Agency

Last fall, residents were served with aneviction notice due to unsanitary conditions and fire hazards.

“People … had nowhere else to go,” Pagé said, adding kicking people out just before winter put lives at risk.

“We decided to fight, and we decided to stick together and put a strong message (out) that these places need to be open.”

They won a delay until spring. Their aim was to get the building renovated and turn it into social housing, without evicting the residents or requiring people who live there to change their lifestyles.

“We’re trying to maintain housing and maintain a community that has built itself, that supports itself, that doesn’t always need us,” she said.

They encountered a setback when the house was damaged in a fire last spring.

‘Problem properties’

In Alberta, the Sheriffs’ Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods (SCAN) unit is responsible for policing problem properties, including drug houses.

Earlier this year, a SCAN official said they had investigated 4,200 problem properties across Alberta since 2008 and issued 72 community safety orders. In the spring, they shuttered a “drug house” in Edmonton’s Newton neighbourhood that had been the scene of a homicide.

jwakefield@postmedia.com

twitter.com/jonnywakefield