Montreal City Weblog

Kate 08:50 on 2020-08-27 Permalink Reply  

• Tim 11:40 on 2020-08-27 Permalink

  The first linked article is top notch. Unlike the recommendations that were circulated recently by faculty and students about Jame McGill, which were rife with logical fallacies, the author uses clear explanations and logic to demonstrate that the development around MIL has never been about anything other than replacing the Park Extension neighborhood.

• david1001 12:00 on 2020-08-27 Permalink

  I don’t think anyone in authority cares about Parc-Ex to want to replace it or really do anything with it. There was a huge rail yard up there, they wanted another campus, it was tabula rasa, as simple as that.

  However, the pressures on rents and renovictions – which were already happening in Parc-Ex before the first shovel was in the ground at the UdeM campus – are going to accelerate as a result of the new campus, no question.

  But while the activists’ consensus is that new housing development should be locked down because less housing supply will result in lower rents, this is possibly the most thoroughly debunked/baseless/straight dumb of all mainstream political positions in Montreal right now. And the answer is, obviously, to build a lot more housing.

  In the broader plan, Parc-Ex is a victim of systematic underbuilding in high demand central neighborhoods, so that excess/unmet housing demand in Plateau/Rosemont/Outremont neighborhoods is spilling over and landing further north.

  The demand for housing in Parc-Ex will increase as a result of the new campus, no question, but it’s part of a larger structural process – a corrupt bargain between owners who wants to see property values and rents increase, renters who have theirs already and feel housing secure because of the regie, hard line conservative preservation types who will take higher rents if it means the city looks the same, and dummy activists who don’t know how the housing market works.

  Getting thousands more new units built each year between Sherbrooke and Jean Talon would greatly lighten the load that lower rent areas in further flung neighborhoods are being forced to shoulder.

• MarcG 13:05 on 2020-08-27 Permalink

  @Tim: I read the McGill article you mentioned and didn’t find anything wrong with it besides the too-lengthy student remarks praising the course. I’d be curious to know which fallacies you noticed but perhaps this isn’t the place for it…

• Tim 14:50 on 2020-08-27 Permalink

  I took some time to go through the pdf because I wanted to understand things better. The one that sticks out is the following facility recommendation from page 81 of https://www.blackcanadianstudies.com/Recommendations_and_Report.pdf

  “Since there are so few black and indigenous faculty, when racism is encountered, the department chairs (the first point of contact) or faculty deans are often white people who lack the necessary lived experience and training and therefore are ignorant of the issues and unsympathetic.”

  Just because someone is white does not mean that therefore they are ignorant and unsympathetic. A white person might be those things or they might not.

• Michael Black 15:24 on 2020-08-27 Permalink

  Forty years ago Patty McDermott of Greenpeace Toronto said something, and added “we’re egalitarian”. I looked around that room and everyone was white, most were young, and most were either in university or had graduated.

  It’s not about what you declare, but of actively reaching out. And that’s hard if you’re not “the other”.

  It brings a different perspective, it brings a different experience.

  Endless white people can be out protesting or writing opinion pieces, but it’s not the same as black or native people speaking for themselves. They can, but often it’s not in the mainstream.

  Decades ago the Gazette had a column by Clifton Ruggles. It ended when he died of cancer. No Black columnist since. The paper had a native columnist for a couple of months, but that’s ended. Admittedly they announced it as a series rather than permanent, the author off to law school. But I doubt they’ll have a replacement.

  During the “Oka Crisis” CJAD had news from Kahnawake, I think someone at the radio station there. But once the “crisis” was over, that stopped.

  Few people stop to think “wait a minute, if I’m speaking, someone else isn’t”. So we get to hear what white people think, rather than directly from Black or native people. White columnists tend to be outraged by the big stories, when someone directly affected may have other concerns.

  The world isn’t changed by the status quo.

• david282 17:05 on 2020-08-27 Permalink

  Yeah, or instead of totally baseless conspiracy theorists involving crazy implausible links and nefarious motivations, it could just be that there was a big disused rail yard there, the campus was built on it, and now there’s more demand for housing, which will mean displacement for the existing gang up there. Not rocket science.

  The more mysterious and conspiratorial the theories you use to explain the operation of society, and the more you lean away from using the actual modes of analysis we know to be practical and accurate, the more the movement loses the ability to answer the questions that the culture is actually posing. Think Marxist economics, religious theories of celestial movement, medieval medicine – framing a long-running housing problem perfectly understood by economics as instead being part of global conspiracy against non-whites . . . how do you even finish a sentence without feeling like a charlatan (or his mark)?

• Chris 18:45 on 2020-08-27 Permalink

  I’m not well versed on gentrification, but I happened to read this the other day:

  https://quillette.com/2019/11/25/why-do-progressives-hate-gentrification/

  and it address much of what y’all have been discussing.

• walkerp 21:54 on 2020-08-27 Permalink

  You do realize that Quillette is an extreme right publication, gussied up in Canadian politeness and pseudo-intellectualism. Recognize that anything you read there is driven primarily by ideology.

• Chris 22:21 on 2020-08-27 Permalink

  I’d never heard of them before coming across this article. But better to judge a piece on its arguments and data, not on who wrote it or where it was published. Perhaps you’d care to comment on the substance of the article instead of name calling? Anyway, I wasn’t even agreeing or disagreeing with it, just sharing. (Also, everything you read everywhere is driven primarily by ideology, I’d dare say.)

• MarcG 06:41 on 2020-08-28 Permalink

  That Quillette article quickly degenerated into a defense of “whiteness”. The gentrification of Verdun and Pointe-Saint-Charles have nothing to do with race. Also, it focussed on increasing property values, which is not interesting to people who are renting, except perhaps in the way that it increases their cost of living. It ignored people who rent in the neighbourhood who do not move away and pay the new, higher, rents at the expense of groceries and other necessities. It says, without argument, just a link to a book, that rent control makes housing less affordable.