Rosemont protects shoebox houses – to a point
Rosemont has passed a bylaw protecting shoebox houses but with provisos that citizen referendums could force an agreement to alter or demolish individual ones.
Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve has also passed a similar bylaw.
david100 04:22 on 2019-02-13 Permalink
Wonderful. Protect property values, increase gentrification, off load demand for housing onto more neighborhoods, incentivize landlords to do dodgy evictions to capture the value created by the artificial land shortage. Genius move.
It’s funny that in Quebec and Montreal, the one thing that everyone agrees on is that once you have your place, the ladder comes up. It’s all perfectly clear for Mr. Activist until he graduates to a place in life where he might try to buy a flat for more stability, and realizes that he’s spent 15 years pushing hardcore anti-growth policies that have priced him out of his own neighborhood. Hey and, by the way, that triplex is now a single family home, as is what used to be a shop, and much of the high street.
Nice work, Project Montreal, preserving these stupid shacks because nostalgia is a believable mask for what’s really going on: a corrupt bargain between anti-development owners who are interested only in their property values and economically illiterate activists who view even fixing potholes as triggering/suggestive of a move to displace them. Hopefully, Legault proves himself useful and straight up strips the city of the ability to make restrictions like this.
Kate 11:24 on 2019-02-13 Permalink
I don’t think it has to be catastrophized, david100. The neighbourhoods where these houses are found are changing, but gradually. These protective laws mostly mean rapacious developers will think twice before seeing the houses basically as prey. If someone owns such a house and wants to expand or demolish it, there will be a mechanism to apply for that – it simply won’t be made easy. Property ownership is still paramount in this society.
mare 13:04 on 2019-02-13 Permalink
Almost all shoebox houses in the streets surrounding my place, in a booming part of Petite-Patrie are mostly owned by rather marginal people, judging by the loads of crap in their large front yards. Shoebox houses are tiny, don’t have rental income and were cheap homes to buy. City valuation is low so they are very popular with developers who demolish the tiny building and build 3 condos with parking garage on the lot. I think it’s good that they can’t do that anymore; a small, one story house with a larger front yard here and there breaks up the monotony of a street.
Bill Binns 14:42 on 2019-02-13 Permalink
Although I’m not exactly an opponent of gentrification, I agree with David100 above. I have seen this over and over. Whenever a neighborhood or municipality passes fussy architectural rules to “protect” a type of residential property or a small village feel or whatever, invariable those protected properties get bought up by folks who like to see their homes in architectural magazines. Cape Cod is full of adorable little 2 bedroom cottages in former working class areas where you now need a permit from the Historical Preservation Committee to install a new mailbox. it is exactly this type of neighborhood cultivation and uniformity that attracts the terrible terrible rich people.
Hamza 18:39 on 2019-02-13 Permalink
David100 – It’s truly a tragedy that the opporunity to buy a flat (I.e. condos) has become so rare in this town. Surely if we built more of these rarified anonymous condo blocks gentrification would be defeated.
/s
There’s a fine city called Toronto down the 401 if you want that sort of stuff. I’ll stick with my ‘stupid shacks’ and anti-developer activists thanks.
david100 22:18 on 2019-02-13 Permalink
You won’t “stick” anywhere with anything, because you’ll be priced out and forced to move. The flat you rent will be sold, and you’ll be evicted for an owner move-in. Then you’ll find that, wow, it’s a lot more expensive to rent than it was when you got your rent controlled unit. So, after weighing your budget against the cost, you’ll decide you have to move to another neighborhood. But then you find that years of under-construction and multiplying restrictions have dumped excess housing demand into all the hoods surrounding yours. So, where do you end up? In the pool of people bidding up the cost of what housing is allowed, and moving ever farther away. Or if you’re poor enough, you end up on the social housing lists, most of which have years of wait list.
This has already happened to Mile End and much of the Plateau, it’s happening in Rosemont, it’s moving north.
The idea that it’s progressive to keep the quaint village is absolutely and totally based on the understanding of a different era.
Tim S. 22:32 on 2019-02-13 Permalink
David100: I get your logic, to an extent, but does this mean we can’t have quaint little villages anymore? I was reading an urban planning-type book once that made the point that one reason why people are leaving Hong Kong and Chinese cities and trying to settle here is that our cities are nicer. It would be nice if there were different options – say, making suburbs more attractive.
david100 22:43 on 2019-02-13 Permalink
People have this idea that we have to turn Montreal into Toronto or Hong Kong. The truth is that we just need to allow a gentle increase in development, and keep costs down. Lift the two- or three-story cap to four- or five-stories north of Sherbrooke. Prohibit new parking ingresses in most neighborhoods. Let the city build massively in the areas best connected to transit – Ville Marie should be taking 50% of new starts. The best example of construction in all of Montreal right now isn’t the area around the Bell Center, it’s Bishop Street between Sainte-Cath and R-L, where we have some of the only street-wall midrise build since the war.
Except for when I was growing up, my only Montreal residences have been on the Plateau, and it has changed. A lot of that was inevitable, but if some of the empty lots, say on Saint Dominique, Marie-Anne, Mont Royal, etc had been built at 7-8 story structures with 40-60 units instead of triplexes, you’d have taken a lot of pressure off the neighborhood housing stock, and supported a lot of the existing neighborhood businesses.
Hamza 03:47 on 2019-02-14 Permalink
Your whole theory is based on a fake premise that condos will prevent gentrification. More development, especially of the high-rise kind, is the opposite of a solution. Ask st-henri or Griffintown if development helped or hurt. Regular folk who’ve lived in the *densest neighborhood in the country* and other desirable neighborhoods do so because they don’t want the same kind of development as you’re taking about.
While Toronto and Vancouver and other major cities have gone the route you speak of, we’ve mostly avoided such excess and kept rents and cost-of-living reasonable while keeping quality-of-life at a peak.
Nothing is broken. Only the irrational desires of developers to make profits and destroy neighborhoods to ‘save them.’
Tim 09:33 on 2019-02-14 Permalink
Hamza: do not limit the greed to developers only. Municipal governments salivate at all the revenue generated by the property taxes associated with condos. They can’t wait to jump into bed with developers.