Montreal’s perpetual state of construction does not deceive: it remains a city of constant change.
The McCord Museum’s current exhibition, Pounding the Pavement, perfectly captures the city’s eclectic spirit in a collection of Montreal street photography, running until October 28th — demonstrating how street culture, particularly vibrant in neighborhoods like the Plateau, binds together the city’s many diasporas, later widened by the influx of international students.
In truth, Montreal is now a place many call “home.”
Ironically, the streets are also marked by the presence of unhoused First Nations people, who make up roughly 12 per cent of Montreal’s visible houseless population. Indeed, long before its colonization, the island was home to the Mohawk and Anishinaabemowin peoples — known by their names Tiohtià:ke and Mooniyang. However, the current influx of international populations has reshaped the city both geographically and economically, further pushing Indigenous peoples to its margins.
Originally, the Plateau thrived as a multicultural hub for working-class European immigrants between the 1850s and the 1970s. Slowly, it became the original bourgeois-bohème hub, welcoming Montreal’s artistic immigrant scene — and the very underground local Québécan culture.
However, the Plateau’s reputation has shifted.
It is now one of the most coveted places to live in Montreal, often branded as the city’s bougie heart. And, according to Radio-Canada, the Plateau now stands as Montreal’s most expensive neighborhood.
For many long-time Montrealers, the Plateau has lost the prestige it once carried, and has become far removed from the European bourgeois-bohème image it originally sold. As the neighbourhood became an alternative to traditional student housing and, increasingly, as an English-speaking enclave, its identity was reshaped when many streets were given anglicized names in the early 2000s — such as Gilford Street, once Chemin des Carrières– at the cost of erasing Quebecois history. A new wave of gentrification has accelerated this transformation, driven by private residential and commercial investments that inflate housing prices, raise living costs, and displace residents, while commodifying the essential character of the Plateau neighborhood.
This represents a shift from earlier attempts to profit from the Plateau’s cultural cachet — most notably before October 2018, when the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough restricted short-term rentals like Airbnbs — toward a new model of gentrification, where living in the neighborhood has become an expensive and transitory experience. Gentrification in the Plateau doesn’t rely on big chains displacing small businesses. Instead, it thrives on aesthetic consumption: the rise of pricey, vintage shops along St-Denis, the sudden appearance of eight-dollar matcha pop-up concept cafés, and the opening of costly niche bookstores on Duluth.
Under this veil of aestheticism, the process of gentrification raises serious concerns about housing discrimination against Indigenous peoples in Montreal, where wealthy international students are often prioritized for leases, reinforcing enduring colonial patterns of exclusion. Indigenous peoples represent only 0.6 per cent of Montreal’s total population, but they made up 12 per cent of the city’s unhoused population in 2018 — marking them as the first and most vulnerable victims of gentrification even before the process fully unfolded. Indeed, Indigenous homelessness is rooted in Canada’s colonial history. Indigenous communities have been subject to land dispossession under the 1876 Indian Act, systemic disempowerment through the denial of self-governance, and the cultural violence of residential schools that severed their ties to land, language, and education. Today, many Indigenous families continue to face discrimination in housing services, despite legal entitlements to support them. Here, Indigenous homeless people’s high visibility in areas like Park Avenue or the McGill “Ghetto” — ironically named, given its soaring rents — underscores how gentrification reshapes socio-spatial representations, pushing them further from places like the Plateau.
Homelessness among Indigenous peoples can take on chronic or cyclical forms, often intertwined with mental health struggles, addictions, or unstable employment. Yet, beyond individual causes, it is best understood as the product of historic and ongoing displacement, cultural genocide, and spiritual disconnection. What disadvantaged minority neighborhoods truly require is sustained, targeted reinvestment that provides resources and opportunities while safeguarding affordable housing. Indigenous peoples, however, face compounded barriers — they are 27 times more likely to be homeless than non-Indigenous people, with Inuit individuals being 80 times more likely.
The Plateau’s gentrification lays bare a bitter truth: the housing gap between international students and struggling Indigenous people is wielded as an excuse to make the class and ethnic divide even wider. Home should not be reserved for the lucky few.