Montreal City Weblog

Kate 21:21 on 2019-02-12 Permalink Reply  

• Faiz Imam 08:03 on 2019-02-13 Permalink

  Aka “the group of wealthy businessmen who are preparing a run a massive campaign to get public approval for a new team have gone all in on this one site, with the message that if they don’t get it there is no future for a team”

  That’s one of prime pieces of developable land in the core of the city, right next to a rem station and next to griffin town with its great lack of schools, community centers or much public services at all.

  Berk basin would be an amazing place to *properly* plan the next great neighbourhood, which would be of benifit to all the areas around them.

  Instead we’d get a giant black hole that brings in people 80 afternoons/evenings a year but will be otherwise abandoned.

• Su 09:01 on 2019-02-13 Permalink

  I wonder how much they will be paying Canada Lands to acquire the property. It would require an access to information clearance to get that info I suppose. It would be reassuring to know that we got at least market value for that prime piece of land.

• Kevin 09:27 on 2019-02-13 Permalink

  Do these baby boomers really not realize that nobody else cares about their sports nostalgia?

  The average audience of major professional North American sports continues to drop while the average age of the audience increases.
  Baseball’s audience has dropped each year for the past six years, and last year’s was the lowest in 15 years.
  The only leagues with an average audience under 45 are MLS and the NBA.

  And nothing is going to crack that. Not even the Super Bowl — that supposedly mega-event — affected the audience for Netflix on that day.

  Sorry fogies, society has left you behind. The kids would rather play Minecraft, Fortnite — or watch Twitch.

• Uatu 11:41 on 2019-02-13 Permalink

  Seriously. I remember when the world series dominated the media and broadcast time. Now it’s just a footnote on a newsfeed. It’s just going to be another black hole for public money.

• John B 11:45 on 2019-02-13 Permalink

  In that rendering a fairly heavily used bike path & bridge is removed.

• Blork 13:03 on 2019-02-13 Permalink

  @John B, I wouldn’t put much faith in the veracity of that rendering. It’s very crude; looks like it was banged out in five minutes. There’s nothing put in place that would block the path, so it’s more likely a matter of them just not adding that level of detail.

• Morgan 16:22 on 2019-02-13 Permalink

  Montreal has previously said it wants the area to become an employment hub, not a residential one.

  The people in charge have (I believe) said they also want to develop the area right next to the stadium, presumably with restaurants, hotels etc.

  I think the success would depend on the type of project. I think it would be cool if the stadium could also be used for other stuff besides baseball.

• david100 22:08 on 2019-02-13 Permalink

  I’m skeptical that Montreal can pull this off, but SF ballpark (for example) is a massive success on every level, and anchored a massive redevelopment that is successful on every level, by every measure. Yeah, demand for housing in SF meant that housing would have development would have happened no matter what, but the specific form was really ballpark dependent.

  Surprisingly, I disagree about the appeal of a baseball team, but with a big caveat. I’m not at all a fan, but I could pretty easily be drawn into attending night games if it were not too expensive. The real problem with sports in Montreal is the super high cost of attending live games. The soccer games are funner than the depressing experience of attending Habs games (it’s like being in Vegas nowadays) but the price is still not all that low, and baseball would be more like that but potentially with much lower attendance costs. Tickets for baseball games can be as low as $5 bucks in a lot of US markets even today, like the Expos were back 20 years ago, and I’d gladly pay, say, $20 for an okay seat every few weeks, even though I care nothing about baseball. It’s anecdotal, but I’m sure that if someone as bored with sports as I am would be in, the demand for (affordable) tickets could be quite high. If students could get $10 tickets, I could see it being a pretty popular thing, regardless of what anyone thinks about baseball. Just something different and fun to do in a neat environment. And as demand rises, so would the cost of tickets – I believe baseball teams were the first to introduce “surge” pricing, ie. fluctuating ticket prices based on demand.