Montreal City Weblog

Kate 10:53 on 2021-03-17 Permalink Reply  

• Meezly 10:57 on 2021-03-17 Permalink

  A report recommendation from the private sector? Gasp!

• Kevin 11:57 on 2021-03-17 Permalink

  I’ve never seen a consultant recommend something that the person who hired them didn’t want them to recommend.

  That said — if the city wants to revive the downtown core, pedestrian streets won’t be enough. It’s got to create loads of three and four and five bedroom apartments/condos in the core. Do it by transforming office space into residential, and by looking at all those dinky condos currently being built and changing them into places where a family will want to live.

  It also has to acknowledge that when you have multiple people in a family, the odds are that at least one of them will not be living near their workplace and so will need to use a vehicle (whether public or private).

• Kate 12:53 on 2021-03-17 Permalink

  Projet can at least say their ideas are backed up by a major business firm. Projet is pushing back against some perceptions that it’s a sort of pie-in-the-sky idealist outfit, anti-car and anti-business. No matter what’s gone wrong on their watch – most of which is outside their remit as a municipal government – they are accused of not having created enough parking or made the city more welcoming to business. Facebook is full of people fulminating against Valérie Plante (many of whom, I suspect, don’t even live in the city).

  I don’t blame them for wanting to get a PwC report on their side.

• Spi 13:22 on 2021-03-17 Permalink

  @Kate I think you’re really missing the point Kevin is making. It’s standard practice in business and government to hire an “independent” external consultancy to validate/rubber stamp whatever idea you have and need to build a case for.

  Your response is exactly the desired effect, get people’s buy-in because you can point towards a reputable firm producing a supporting document.

  Anyone that’s hired a major consulting firm knows how much sway they have in shaping whatever the findings are going to be since you’re the one paying them.

• CE 14:22 on 2021-03-17 Permalink

  I don’t understand this idea that downtown needs to be “revived” by injecting a bunch of kids and the infrastructure perceived to be needed to entertain them. Especially since the knee jerk assumption is that they will require the comforts and amenities that suburban kids have.

  A downtown that is desirable for kids and large families will put the area in opposition to what already makes it desirable for many people (nightlife, the fast pace, loudness, etc.). For me personally, a downtown full of families and kids is neither desirable nor attractive (it sounds pretty boring!)

• Kate 14:35 on 2021-03-17 Permalink

  Spi, I’m not. I realize Projet is playing with perceptions. Obviously the PwC report changes nothing, but it does mean the party can point to it when making a case.

  CE, I tend to agree with you, but how else do you counter the pervasive idea that you live downtown in your crazy youth, but to reproduce you must swim back upstream to the suburbs?

• DeWolf 14:58 on 2021-03-17 Permalink

  I feel like we need a reality check: there are already tons of people living downtown with a lot more on the way. That even includes many families. Walk around the western part of downtown around 4pm and you’ll see lots of parents walking their kids home from school right into any number of apartment buildings, including a lot of those new condo towers that have gone up recently. In the 2016 census, 7% of the population in Peter-McGill (ie Shaughnessy Village) was under the age of 16. That’s lower than average for Montreal, but it still represents many thousands of people.

  Downtown will undergo a period of post-Covid adjustment as tourism slowly ramps back up and businesses adjust to having more people working from home. There certainly needs to be more improvement to downtown streetscapes, many of which are not particularly welcoming or attractive. But the idea that it is somehow in decline is absurd. Ten years ago, there were massive parking lots on every side street between Ste-Catherine and René Lévesque, not to mention around the Bell Centre. Now those parking lots are home to thousands of people, with thousands more on the way. That’s not a neighbourhood in decline.

  I also tend to agree with CE about downtown being a place (the one place, really) where noisy festivals and loud nightlife can be accommodated. There’s a balance that needs to be stuck between being a residential area and being a cultural destination.

• ant6n 14:59 on 2021-03-17 Permalink

  @CE
  Ironically, your argument has a lot of urban/suburban-divide assumptions built in, a perspective built on truths that are not actually universal.

  I’ve lived in Montreal in downtown areas for a long time, and although I’m not a suburban child. It wasn’t the nightlife or the unnecessary noise and pollution or lack of green spaces that attracted me there.

  Recently I’ve been staying in downtown Berlin for a while, only 200m away from some of the more interesting night life (Sage, KitKat, Tresor). They’re a mild nuisance to me, but overall its relatively quiet. My two-year old was totally unaware of the nightlife, although I’m sure he really appreciated the various playgrounds in the area, other kids that live around, or being able to walk to daycare.

  Right now the kid moved with the in-laws to Brossard for a while, and the boringness and lack of stimulation is hell.

• Kevin 15:01 on 2021-03-17 Permalink

  @CE
  The issue is that right now, the pendulum in Montreal has swung too far one way: downtown Montreal is office towers and not much else. The pandemic showed us that without the nightclubs and restaurants, nothing distinguishes our city’s core from Ottawa.

  That’s not sustainable.

  It’s also unworkable to have people commuting from the burbs into the downtown core* to a pedestrianized zone. Without the best public transit in the world that’s unlikely to happen.

  So the city needs to have more people living in the core — and that means families.
  But it doesn’t mean it has to be dull.

  I lived in Manhattan for several years, along with 1.5 million other people. There are tonnes of families in that borough and oodles of hidden parks and other amenities that you would never notice if you were concentrating on the nightlife and restaurants and shopping.

  *I think a lot of people don’t realize how much downtown Montreal living has changed. In the 90s almost a quarter of a million people lived and worked in downtown Montreal. In 2016 that number had dropped by half.
  I wear my cynic medal with pride as I say 12 months of WFH has demonstrated we’re never going to have 350,000 commuters heading from the ‘burbs to downtown ever again.

• DeWolf 15:22 on 2021-03-17 Permalink

  “Downtown Montreal is office towers and not much else.”

  This boggles my mind. Your definition of downtown must be incredibly narrow. How can you stand at the corner of Guy/Ste-Catherine, or St-Laurent/de Maisonneuve, or in front of the Bell Centre, and not notice the thousands of apartments within plain sight?

• DeWolf 15:25 on 2021-03-17 Permalink

  I mean, not to belabour my point, but there are 100,000 people who live within a 20-minute walk of Ste-Catherine and Peel. That’s 1.5 times more people than in the whole of NDG.

  Also, Manhattan is 87 square kilometres, which is roughly equivalent to the whole of central Montreal, not just downtown.

• Kevin 16:36 on 2021-03-17 Permalink

  @DeWolf
  It helps if I don’t bugger up the link in my previous post.
  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/commuter-changes-statscan-montreal-1.5381514

  We can argue about exact amounts and definitions — I think Manhattan is smaller, and Ville-Marie has fewer people — but I think my overall point that downtown does not have enough space for families, and is too reliant on commuters – holds.

• Chris 20:37 on 2021-03-17 Permalink

  >So the city needs to have more people living in the core — and that means families.

  Why must it mean “families”? Why can’t it mean single people for example?

• Ant6n 08:21 on 2021-03-18 Permalink

  A transient mono culture doesn’t make for a robust or vibrant neighborhood.

  Agricultural metaphors apply.

  As Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa puts it, “The children are a sort of indicator. If we build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.”

• Kate 11:11 on 2021-03-18 Permalink

  Chris, I am a non-parent myself. But single people don’t always stay single. Once people pair up – especially in an era where working from home is likely to remain more widespread than it was before the pandemic – they may find they can no longer co-work comfortably in a one-bedroom apartment. Does that mean they should exile themselves to Brossard?

  It’s already been practically a given that if you want to have kids, you have to leave the city. I don’t think that’s good for the city, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t great for the kids either. Some shift is going to have to occur.