Are shoppers really deserting Ste-Catherine?
The Journal trumpets here that shoppers are deserting Ste-Catherine Street for holiday shopping, so when I was walking around there on Friday evening I suppose I was hallucinating for blocks – the crowded sidewalks, the busy stores, the lights, the music, the whole scenario? But this kind of jeremiad can be self-perpetuating. Luckily, La Catherine rises above it still.
Bartek Komorowski 12:38 on 2019-12-08 Permalink
They should really rename the paper Le Journal Anti-Montréal.
Robert H 14:49 on 2019-12-09 Permalink
“Sur la Rive-Nord de Montréal, en revanche, les stationnements débordent. Certains s’installent même sur les terre-pleins. D’après des clients interrogés sur place, la cohue des stationnements est préférable au centre-ville de Montréal.”
Go to some suburban strip mall parking lot, interview a passer-by about why they don’t shop in Centreville, and what do you expect them to say? This is Le Journal D’Anti-Montréal throwing some red meat to its anti-Plante, anti-urban, nativiste readership. The comments after the article say it all: complaints about parking, claims about never going into the city anymore, the city is dying because of its ridiculous administration, Centreville is too multi-ethnic and has lost its Québécois identity, Montréal est un TROU-blah, blah, blah.
The truth is Sainte Catherine street despite its faults is the sort of place that most North American cities are employing urban planners, economists, and designers to recreate in their downtowns. The number of such streets on this continent can be counted on both hands. Suburban areas realize the value and do their best to build a facsimile (Dix30 for example) from nothing. The enduring vitality through ups and downs of La Cat is an encouraging sign of Montreal’s own enduring spirit.
CE 15:16 on 2019-12-09 Permalink
It would be interesting to do the opposite. Interview random people shopping downtown and ask them why they’re not shopping in a suburban mall.
Blork 18:34 on 2019-12-09 Permalink
I really hate this kind of shallow reporting and the shallow commentary that generally follows.
First of all, WHO shops downtown and WHO shops in the suburbs? If someone lives in Pierrefonds or Point-Claire it’s only natural that they’ll shop in malls in those areas. Similarly, people in Laval will shop in Laval malls and people in Brossard or Longueuil will shop in south shore malls. This is normal and not worth further discussion.
The real question is who do we expect to be shopping downtown? I’m thinking people who live in Ville-Marie, some people from the sud-ouest (the ones closer to downtown), plus people from the Plateau, Mile-end, Petite-Patrie, etc. Those people don’t have many malls nearby and getting to and from downtown is not difficult by public transit.
The grey areas are places like NDG, Côte-Saint-Luc, and HOMA. For them, getting downtown without a car is a bit more difficult. If they have a car, then their choice is to go downtown and fight terrible road conditions, cones, detours, and parking shortages, or go the same distance (or less) in the opposite direction to a suburban mall. Given that 90% of the stores are identical, and given that in mall shopping in winter can be more appealing than street shopping, it’s no surprise that many of those people go to the malls. Again, this is pretty normal, and doesn’t indicate much of a shift in the way things have been for 40 years or more.
OK, two things have changed: to some extent the suburban malls have gotten “better” in terms of quality of the stores and quality of the overall experience (food courts are better, the environments overall are nicer), and in the past five or so years the drive downtown — for those who choose to drive — has gotten really really bad. There’s no point in arguing that. The amount of construction and disruption is insane. Someday it will all be fixed, but right now it’s almost unbearable.
But it’s not like cars were invented last week. People have been driving to malls for decades. One of the things that kept Ste-Catherine street alive since the 1980s is the extent to which it simulates suburban malls with places like the Eaton Center, Place Montreal Trust, etc. But if you remove driving access and parking, then that aspect of Ste-Catherine street will suffer. Remember: public transit for downtown shopping is only really an option for people who live close to downtown and who live close to good transit lines.
(None of this should be seen as me arguing “pro car;” I’m just analyzing the situation as objectively as I can.)
What it boils down to is this: people avoid pain. For people who live in those “gray areas” mentioned above, shopping downtown is more painful than shopping in suburban malls. You can lecture them all day that they should take the bus or whatever, but you’re just shouting at clouds. Imagine two parents and two kids living in the western end of NDG who need to get some shopping done on a Saturday. They can pay $25-$30 to take a bus to downtown and back, which will involve a lot of standing around waiting, and will probably take 45 minutes each way, the return trip complicated by carrying a bunch of heavy packages, or they can drive to Carrefour Angrignon in about 12 minutes, where there is free parking. Extrapolate that to the various other grey areas and you get the same thing. It’s great to de-throne the car and to promote public transit and all that, and it will definitely benefit some people, but the more you do that, the bigger your grey areas become and the more people living in those grey areas will choose to go elsewhere. And that too is pretty normal.
Robert H 23:50 on 2019-12-09 Permalink
I don’t dispute your thorough analysis, Blork. Of course, it’s not news that somebody in Brossard or Laval doesn’t go shopping in Centreville. If I lived in either of those suburbs I wouldn’t bother too, even if the traffic were light and the roads unobstructed and smooth as butter. But the editors at Le Journal were well aware that such “reportage” would be welcomed by many readers, especially off-island ones who suffer maddening commutes, are furious about parking restrictions or prices, and municipal policies that reduce the convenience of driving. Gloom and doom tales of miserable Montreal in decline used to be more of a staple in out of town english media, but they can also be found in the french media as well. As Kate suggested, such stories can influence perception unfavorably. However, Sainte Catherine street benefits from the critical mass of people living in Centreville or adjacent to it, combined with employers, major institutions and landmark attractions for residents and tourists. The on-going residential boom of the last five to seven years contributes to that factor. It strengthens the city’s constituency. so its vitality and economy become less reliant on suburbanites coming into town. I realize that condominium towers rising like mushrooms are no substitute for a genuine vie de quartier (remember comments here about Griffintown), but I’ll be optimistic and hope that perhaps this will follow as more people move in and become established.