Are young folks avoiding Montreal?
Numbers show that while young Quebecers from the regions may be attracted by the urban agglomeration, they’re not choosing to live on the island as much as they once did. A couple of suggestions are made here, and it’s likely that changes made for the pandemic – notably a lot of online learning – will only increase the tendency for students not to feel any need to live near an urban campus. But that had already begun, with universities and even CEGEPs spinning off satellite campuses.
But the surge in rental costs and the housing crisis, as suggested, must be huge. For young people accustomed to the sparse landscape of rural and small-town Quebec, Montreal’s more far‑flung suburbs might feel more like home, and offer more affordable housing, than the dense streets of Rosemont or Villeray. (So why move closer to the city at all, I would tend to ask.)
The decline in the number of immigrants, as promised by the CAQ, has also reduced the number of people coming to live on the island. Lionel Perez, of course, blames Valérie Plante.
Em 12:48 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
I can’t help feel that this could be a good thing in the long run. A handful of big cities (led by Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal) can’t continue to sustain the bulk of the country’s population growth forever, and it puts big strain on infrastructure, housing prices, traffic etc.
The optimistic scenario is that some smaller cities start becoming more vibrant hubs with more jobs and cultural offering, thanks to an infusion of new people living and maybe even starting businesses there.
The pessimistic scenario is that everyone will want to move to old-school suburbs and worsen urban sprawl.
Ephraim 13:56 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
In some ways, I agree with Em, but I actually think that we (Canada) needs to sit down and plan a few cities, from the ground up, including public transit, before the city is laid out. Planned growth is better than unplanned. But in the long run, people will still gravitate to large cities because they promise higher growth and wealth.
Kate 14:32 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
I’d have to read up on the existence and success of planned cities, but do you have any confidence they could be real cities rather than simply rows of residential housing with a mall or two somewhere nearby? We can’t build real neighbourhoods any more, so I have my doubts we can create a real city from nothing.
I suppose with the consequences of the pandemic, what you need to do is design condo buildings where each condo unit has not only a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, but also a dedicated office room with broadband for online work and Zoom meetings. I wonder if that’s already on the drawing board somewhere.
DeWolf 15:02 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
“Lionel Perez, of course, blames Valérie Plante.”
I did a double take when I saw that passage in the article. He blames her 20-20-20 policy for pushing people off the island, but the policy doesn’t take effect until next year. So who knows.
Getting lost in the story is that Montreal is not actually losing population – in fact the island’s population is higher than it has ever been at 2.052 million.
Em 16:33 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
@Ephraim I like that idea, but right now I’d settle for any kind of urban planning at the regional level to start, vs the unsustainable free-for-all that exists in many of the cities just outside Montreal (and sometimes within it too).
Ephraim 16:44 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
Kate, think of cities like Brasilia, Canberra, Islamabad, and Washington DC. If you take land and don’t start until after you own the land, you can plan everything, before you parcel it out. You can build tall with green space. Yes, over time it will change, but you can set up the streets, the commercial, industrial and hospitals, etc. You leave extra space for future. You put all the cables underground, etc.
Ian 17:01 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
Brasilia is hardly a shining example of urban planning, it’s considered a failure of urban planning despite having been planed form the ground up by futurist visionaries… who were totally out of touch with the needs of the population.
https://www.curbed.com/2019/6/7/18657121/brasilia-brazil-urban-planning-architecture-design
For that matter TMR was a planned city and it’s not exactly a shining example of anything but NIMBYism.
Em 17:16 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
Irvine, California is a planned city that seems to get named to lots of “best cities” lists, athough I admit I didn’t find it any nicer than many other organically-developed cities in California. It’s designed around the university and does have a balance of industry, shopping and green space.
EmilyG 17:32 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
Also, this isn’t quite the article’s topic, but I think it’s related – many people around my age (late 20’s to mid-30’s) who grew up in the West Island are choosing to live off-island in places west of Montreal. Especially those who have children.
Probably because it’s still physically close enough, and similar enough, to the West Island, but I heard housing prices for places just-off-the-West-Island are lower. Less expensive to get a little box made of ticky-tacky there.
Ian 08:19 on 2020-07-28 Permalink
There is a trailer park in Vaudreuil and there are some parts of Rigaud mountain where it’s straight up farmland with bad cell reception. One of the things that I very much like about Montreal is that you really don’t need to drive that far out of town to basically be in the country – and the drive from, say, Ste Adèle to Sainte Anne is about the same as from Mile End to Ste Anne. Considering that one floor of a triplex in Mile End is about 450k you can get a pretty nice place for a lot less basically in the country, not even the burbs, and still be well within a decent commute. When I worked downtown I worked with a couple of guys that came in from Hawkesbury – which sounds crazy until you realize that in Toronto, by contrast, a 2 hour commute by train each way is totally normal, and southern Ontario is solid city after city with no country at all from Toronto’s lakeshore all the way to Barrie. When I lived in Toronto, I knew people driving in from Kitchener.
I mean let’s be real here, i it takes a minimum hour and a half to get from Mile End to Ste Anne, if you work in Ste Anne, unless you really like living in the city there’s not a lot of incentive not to live west of Dorval and if you do, you will have a car, and then you may as well live off-island… and this is the thing… not everyone likes living in cities. I grew up in the country and I am never doing that again, but for a lot of city folk there is a romantic draw to the notion, much like how so many kids pick up and run off to BC for a few years before they skulk back miserably.
Patrick 13:52 on 2020-07-28 Permalink
@Em, Irvine is OK in some respects but very car-centric. As with the planned cities Kate mentioned, shopping is restricted to a very few areas. I have friends who live in the fairly dense faculty housing neighborhood there, and they cannot walk or bike (by any reasonable measure) to a market, or even a convenience store. On the other hand, would a dep survive in the neighborhood, given the probable rent and the low foot traffic? I doubt there is a solution to this dilemma unless governments intervene in the property market to keep rents low for essential services.
Kate 01:44 on 2020-07-29 Permalink
Just spotted this item about a Hong Kong property tycoon who wants to build an entirely new city for HK expats to live in, in Ireland.