Montreal City Weblog

Kate 09:19 on 2020-06-18 Permalink Reply  

• Ian 09:58 on 2020-06-18 Permalink

  Haha oh dear, the “second” wave hahaha

  …he does realize there’s a Lululemon on one end of St Viateur, and even depanneurs are getting evicted for upscale lunch counters on the other, while 20-30% of our Mile End residential properties are AirBnBs? What a joke! PM is good at adding quirky street furniture & planting flowers along the widened sidewalks, but they are definitely incapable of doing a damn thing about gentrification.

• david34 10:23 on 2020-06-18 Permalink

  Wherein the gentrifiers themselves are renovicted out of the neighborhood they made so desirable.

  Ian’s right, neighborhood PM is a drunk on a bicycle. Hardcore anti-housing construction at the same time that they complain about affordable housing. Look at Rosemont where the fact that people are still allowed to combine multiple units to form a giant single family home is just a deliriously hypocritical policy. The lowest hanging of fruit, but PM’s borough leaders, instead of making this easy change in favor of tenants/density, go the opposite direction, and force – force – owners to keep and maintain those dumpy single family shacks, aka the shoeboxes.

• Chris 10:36 on 2020-06-18 Permalink

  >Wherein the gentrifiers themselves are renovicted out of the neighborhood they made so desirable.

  Exactly. If you haven’t lived in the Mile End since the 1890s, then your generation is the previous generation’s gentrifiers. The cycle continues.

  We either build up, build out, or start reducing human population. (or all 3.)

• DeWolf 10:51 on 2020-06-18 Permalink

  Municipal governments in Canada have very little power. I don’t think it’s fair to blame them for macroeconomic trends that are affecting every city in the country. Everything that can actually make a difference — enforcing the ban on Airbnbs, cracking down on renovictions, building more social housing, imposing a vacancy tax on empty apartments — can’t be done without the involvement of the provincial and/or federal governments. But I guess it’s easy to scapegoat PM because… bike lanes?

• david34 10:59 on 2020-06-18 Permalink

  The city could greatly restrict Airbnb, crack down on renovictions, impose fines for vacancies and, most important of all, the city controls the most powerful housing tool there is: zoning.

  You can spent your political activism in dreamland trying to get money from the province or feds to give you money for a few units of social housing, but to call that an affordable housing plan is absurd. In Montreal, zoning is the most important component. It’s 70% of what matters.

• CE 11:03 on 2020-06-18 Permalink

  A few years ago I read about the Annex neighbourhood in Toronto. It’s similar to the Plateau; near downtown, nice streetscapes, interesting old houses, quirky businesses. It gentrified to the point where there was little left of what made the neighbourhood great and then entered a phase of what the writer called “post-gentrification” where everything got so expensive that only chains could move into the commercial spaces and only bankers and lawyers, etc could afford the houses. The result was a neighbourhood that was much less desirable the hype moved on to other areas. This is what I see happening in Mile End and starting to happen in other places like St-Henri. If you want to line up for 25 minutes with tourists for an ice cream or brunch or spend too much money on vintage clothes, it’s a fantastic place. But finding a laundromat or dep or other useful business is increasingly difficult where, at least for me, it’s now one of the last places in the central city where I’d want to live.

• steph 11:12 on 2020-06-18 Permalink

  Which wave of gentrification is the Old Port at?

• Bill Binns 11:31 on 2020-06-18 Permalink

  “Wherein the gentrifiers themselves are renovicted out of the neighborhood they made so desirable.”

  This is part of a cycle that happens in all types of neighborhoods but can only be complained about in very narrow circumstances. Who are the rightful inhabitants of the Plateau? The Scottish and Irish who built it? The artists that made it cool? Renters? Homeowners? If a majority of people living there now wanted increased density or an end to the scourge of gentrification they could easily vote for officials who promise to monkey with zoning to make it happen.

  I for one cannot wait to be gentrified out of my house and into 4000 sq feet in St Lambert. I have had enough of this island.

• Kate 12:27 on 2020-06-18 Permalink

  steph, the Old Port (if by this you mean in general all of Old Montreal) is kind of a special case on several counts. Old Montreal really is the original city, but into the 19th century most of the streets became commercial adjuncts to what was then the working port. The Plateau, St-Henri, Hochelaga, Point St-Charles and the old unreconstructed Griffintown, and a little later Rosemont and Villeray, were all working class “suburbs” originally, now all in the process of being gentrified.

  But the Old Montreal we know, all those side streets of gray stone buildings between 3 and 5 storeys high, was not built up as a residential district as those were, so it’s hard to say it was ever pre-gentrified. It largely went from being commercial and office space into the mid to late 20th century and then a lot of those buildings were renovated into condos.

• Cadichon 13:39 on 2020-06-18 Permalink

  David, does zoning really represents 70% of what matters ? I think the whole “zoning drives up prices” argument is firmly rooted in a mainly west coast context, where you have cities like Seattle with something like 90% of residential land zoned for detached single family housing. I have never seen a map showing the extent of detached single familiy zoning in Montréal, but I’d guessed it’d be limited to some areas around Mount Royal park, and the outer limits of the city, like Pointe-aux-Trembles, Île-Bizard, etc. Montréal allows 3 ½ woodframe multifamily buildings on vast parts of its territory. I agree that some parts should be upzoned, especially around metro stations, and that the shoebox demolition ban was absurd. But putting so much emphasis on zoning I think misses what puts Montréal apart from other major North American cities.

  I’ll also add that if some PM boroughs have been more density cautious (RPP being a good exemple), I don’t think it reflects all PM boroughs views nor Plante’s stance on that matter.

• Ian 09:51 on 2020-06-19 Permalink

  I’m just saying if Rabouin on one hand says he plans to stop another wave of gentrification while all the rest of PM regularly reminds us of how powerless they are to stop gentrification I can’t help but have my doubts.

  I recognize that I am cynical but I have seen far too much empty virtue-signalling from PM to expect results, especially since the damage has already been done on so many commercial streets like Parc, Bernard, Saint-Viateur, and Fairmount, and so many residential streets like Jeanne-Mance, Esplanade, Waverly, Saint-Urbain & Clark. A 4 and a half can cost over 1800 in Mile End now.