Montreal City Weblog

Kate 09:03 on 2020-10-03 Permalink Reply  

• JaneyB 09:46 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

  Oh no!!! Bad enough it has closed but to be replaced by a condo complex… 🙁

• DeWolf 12:01 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

  Condos are just apartments, I’m not sure why a condo building is any more offensive than other types of private housing. Many of the “condos” going up are actually rental apartments, especially in that part of town.

  Unless you’re suggesting it should be social housing, in which case I agree, since Montreal needs a lot more of that.

  I think the biggest tragedy here is that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to music venues closing, something that has been happening for years but will only accelerate with the pandemic. The big venues will survive but it’s the little ones that are really necessary to support a healthy music scene.

• Kate 12:14 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

  Thing is this: buildings like l’Escalier’s are all over town, and conventionally they have retail of some kind on the ground floor, maybe apartments upstairs, possibly offices in some cases. You tear down an older brick building like this one and put up a modern condo building and rent out the ground floor to what? Look at what’s along that stretch of Ste‑Catherine: a magazine store, the spaghetti restaurant, l’Escalier, an Amir on the corner – but a new, glitzy condo building is not going to be affordable for small-scale retail, so you’re going to get another couple of franchise businesses, and there are already enough of those. We’re getting rid of the older, run-down buildings offering space for marginal outfits and making the city fit only for chains with deep pockets for high rents. Inevitable, but the city loses some of its texture every time it happens.

• DeWolf 12:42 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

  You’re absolutely right that low-rent buildings are vital to the cultural and economic health of the city. That was one of Jane Jacob’s most important arguments. In this particular case, I think it’s a shame that the city is allowing eclectic commercial blocks on Ste-Catherine to be torn down and redeveloped when there are still surface parking lots just around the corner.

  But I was questioning the reflexive disdain for “condos” when redevelopment is part of the natural process of the city. Most of the new development going up around town is not particularly luxurious, especially around the Latin Quarter, where new condos and rental apartments are mid-market at best. Today’s new buildings are tomorrow’s cheap old buildings.

• PatrickC 13:28 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

  I don’t see why the problem of street-level retail in new buildings can’t be solved by some kind of land-use policy that creates favorable conditions for public amenities on that level. Don’t some European countries have this?

• Kate 16:22 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

  PatrickC, I’m pretty sure zoning means there’s supposed to be a commercial ground floor along there, but I know of stretches of commercial streets elsewhere with sudden blocks of purely residential buildings breaking up the commercial continuity, and nothing is worse for discouraging people from walking along a commercial street than finding themselves on blocks of dead frontage. Did those developers get a derogation? I have no idea.

  I don’t know how much city hall cares about this. The fonctionnaires drive.

• david877 18:57 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

  The city currently has a policy to require ground floor retail in redevelopments like this, despite market conditions. If we add a policy punishing empty storefronts, that gets the new space onto the market cheaper (even if the loss is pushed onto the residents of the building). We combine this with reforms that greatly reduce the difficulties/costs associated with opening/running a business in Montreal, and we start to get back to the heyday conditions that gave us the city that we all love.

  Love l’escalier more than I can say (literally first date/kiss/etc there with the before/after woman in my life), and I’m very very sad to see it go. Imagine if there was so much housing going up in Montreal that the value of redeveloping this well-used property was only marginal. Thank the artificial land shortage created by our anti-housing policies.