Artists built an illicit ‘luxury squat’ in a vacant Montreal factory to protest the housing crisis
Designer Marc-Antoine Goyette, and architect Gabriel Lacombe, trying to bring light to what they see as inaction by authorities to alleviate the housing crisis, reclaimed the space by creating an illicit art installation.Selena Phillips-Boyle/The Globe and Mail
Protest art related to Montreal’s housing crisis has found an unlikely home inside of a building that once served to make torpedo boats.
As the Second World War progressed from a land war to pitched naval battles in the Atlantic, the Canadian Power Boat Company opened its factory to support the effort.
Erected around 1940 in the Southwest borough of Canada’s largest city at the time, it is the only shipyard along the Lachine Canal to have survived to this day, according to a 2011 statement of heritage interest.
In recent years, the city, its most recent owner, vacated the hulking structure, leaving it to decay.
“Keep out,” reads a sign on a placarded window. “This place is dangerous due to the risks of collapse, contamination or fall.”
The vacant building that houses the art installation continues to deteriorate. Part of the roof has collapsed, and virtually all the windows are broken.Selena Phillips-Boyle/The Globe and Mail
But designer Marc-Antoine Goyette and architect Gabriel Lacombe, trying to bring light to what they see as inaction by authorities to alleviate the housing crisis, reclaimed the space by creating an illicit art installation. They call it a “luxury squat for wealthy punks.”
On a recent visit, Mr. Goyette entered via an open garage door and walked through a maze of cavernous rooms, narrow staircases and holes in concrete walls. The floor was littered with broken glass, beer cans and discarded wooden pallets. The walls were covered in graffiti. An eclectic mix of furniture, including park benches, office desks, and a bathtub, were scattered about.
The installation’s entry was hidden behind planks. With its opulent style, the room offered a stark contrast to its surroundings. A maple hardwood floor, damask wallpaper, several volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and a Victorian recamier adorned the candle-lit studio, which would have been cozy if it weren’t for the cold.
The installation’s entry was hidden behind planks.Selena Phillips-Boyle/The Globe and Mail
The project – made possible by a $25,000 grant from the Canada Council for the Arts – aimed to reclaim an abandoned space, using public money, to offer the possibility of dignity and even pomp to the area’s homeless and squatting population. It was completed last fall.
The artists wanted to highlight “not only the right to housing, which is an obvious need, but also the right to beauty,” Mr. Goyette said.
Average rent in Montreal went from $841 a month in 2019 to $1,167 in 2024, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). “Rental market affordability in Montréal continued to erode over the past year,” the CMHC noted in a report last fall.
Meanwhile, the estimated number of unhoused people in the city went from 3,657 in 2018 to 4,690 in 2022, when the most recent count was completed. As elsewhere in the country, tent encampments are routinely erected and dismantled while shelters overflow.
Completing the project was not easy. Twice, it was destroyed in the artists’ absence, forcing them to relocate and build protective walls around the studio. “Creating a room with new materials and heavy furniture requires logistics and organization that we had underestimated,” Mr. Goyette wrote in a final report to the Council for the Arts.
Mr. Goyette himself became a victim of the housing crisis while working on the project, when he was evicted from his Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood apartment in 2022. Feeling like he could no longer afford to live in the city, the designer relocated to Sherbrooke, about 130 km east of Montreal, further complicating work.
The project was made possible by a $25,000 grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.Selena Phillips-Boyle/The Globe and Mail
Despite the challenges, the project “is a total success,” he wrote in the report. To further illustrate their point and gauge the desperation of people seeking housing, they put the room – which had no running water or functioning appliances – up for rent online, asking for $400 a month. “More than 200 people responded to the offer in less than 24 hours,” Mr. Goyette wrote.
After the Second World War, the building was sold to Lines Bros Ltd., a toy manufacturer. A later owner rented space to artists for workshops until the city took over and evicted them in 2012.
Paul Machnik’s printmaking studio was among those displaced from the former shipyard. “It was a wonderful incubator of sorts,” he said in a phone interview, with ateliers sharing the space and collaborating. “It was disrupted completely for no good reason.”
Montreal said the borough used the space for storage until last year, but Google Maps images show few signs of activity past 2014. Last March, Infoman, a popular Quebec TV show satirizing current events, aired a segment showing hundreds of recycling and composting bins in the factory, apparently forgotten there by the city.
In 2021, Sid Lee Architecture won a competition to revitalize the lot with its project Les Ateliers Cabot, a “circular economy community project with an artistic, entrepreneurial and technological focus.”
To further illustrate their point and gauge the desperation of people seeking housing, they put the room – which had no running water or functioning appliances – up for rent online, asking for $400 a month.Selena Phillips-Boyle/The Globe and Mail
But more than three years later, no work has been done.
Sid Lee spokesperson Samuel Courtemanche said in an e-mail that the COVID-19 pandemic and unexpected structural issues delayed the project but that they aim “to break ground this year.”
City of Montreal spokesperson Gonzalo Nunez said in an e-mail that “some elements are still under negotiation between the City and the developer.” He said negotiations are confidential.
Dr. Anja Borck, a museum director and industrial heritage expert who wrote part of her PhD thesis on the former shipyard, said Sid Lee’s approach does not “show a lot of respect” for the site’s historical value. “They take it as if the building is a scrapbook, they can do with it what they want,” she said in a phone interview.
In the meantime, the building continues to deteriorate. Part of the roof has collapsed, and virtually all the windows are broken.
Mr. Nunez said the city’s security service visited the site more than 100 times in 2024, leading to “about twenty barricading actions and five evictions of individuals or groups.”
After a report on the illicit studio by Le Devoir, Mr. Goyette assumed it would be promptly destroyed. He bumped into city workers in hazmat suits on a subsequent visit. But it’s still there, and he recently removed the planks hiding the studio’s entrance, effectively inviting visitors.
Mr. Nunez said the city has “no plans to demolish” the art installation. He stressed, however, that the building is dangerous and access remains forbidden.