Montreal City Weblog

Kate 08:16 on 2019-05-25 Permalink Reply  

• EmilyG 10:13 on 2019-05-25 Permalink

  “L’utilisation de ces espaces pour la location Airbnb sera interdite.”
  I am glad to hear that.

• Faiz Imam 22:25 on 2019-05-25 Permalink

  At least the main podium seems well dimentionned to fit in with the rest of the block. Urban design 101, but even that seems lacking these days.

  Nothing special about it, not offensive, but not great. I wonder how bad it will be for shading and sunlight?

• Kate 09:36 on 2019-05-26 Permalink

  Yes, at least it has some setback from the street. I don’t know whether our laws mandate those, as Manhattan’s do, but it makes things more tolerable at street level.

• david100 15:04 on 2019-05-27 Permalink

  This project will do a lot to bring people into that area at night, which is good.

  On the question of Airbnb, it seems to me that it’s a bad thing that they’re not allowed here. A part of my plan would be to restrict Airbnb only to newew construction, with a trailing ban of 15-20 years, so that you could use short term rental for a certain number of years and then it would be permanently folded into the regular rental market. This sort of move, similar to rent control rules in other jurisdictions, would incentivize construction of new units that would eventually become permanent local rental stock, while keeping a steady supply of short term rental available, keep the pressure on to build, etc.

• CE 15:51 on 2019-05-27 Permalink

  @david100 Why not just build a hotel so it can be regulated and taxed under existing structures?

• david100 17:44 on 2019-05-27 Permalink

  Build hotels too. The idea is that we should be encouraging housing construction as much as possible, and that for new construction (in some areas) we should be allowing short term rental to draw in investor dollars to get the buildings up. Housing as an investment vehicle is stupid and wasteful – people should be investing in productive segments of the economy, in entrepreneurship, technology, etc. not in betting on speculators’ moves or housing scarcity. Literally, the model in the Canada is to count on a housing shortage or a bubble so that the cost of housing continues to increase. This at the expense of productive investments that would grow the national wealth.

  If we allow short term rentals and restrict them to new build construction (in some areas), we’ll get investors to fund new construction of rental units by allowing them to invest in single unit hotel rooms over a period of time. The net result may be to eat the hotels’ lunch somewhat, which would suck in many ways, but the consequence would be that every new hotel room created in this way had only a limited number of years on that market before it transitioned to regular housing. The more short term rental units are built, the more rental units come on the market in 15 or whatever years. And the income from those units gets developers over the financing hump on condo projects, leading to more construction overall.