Denis Coderre has just written a book, Retrouver Montréal, which Valérie Plante says is full of “je, me, moi.” And she wants him to make his plans clear for November.
Updates from March, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The extension of the blue line is being delayed yet again.
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Kate
A man has been charged in the mysterious homicide that left a body in a Verdun alley in February. Cops put up a command post, went door-to-door in the neighbourhood and learned enough to make the arrest.
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Kate
The city doesn’t plan to kill off the “surplus” white-tailed deer mooching around east-end Pointe-aux-Prairies park. An expert study had recommended killing 40 of them, three quarters of the 55‑strong herd.
JS
Is it naive to wonder why they can’t just place a trail of bread crumbs from the park to the parking lot and up a ramp into one of those trailers they move horses around in and drive the deer a half hour away to somewhere with more space(and maybe more wolves)?
Kate
Last I saw, Longueuil was planning to do that with some of the deer from Michel-Chartrand park, but I have a feeling it’s more complicated than it looks to move 40 deer.
Would these animals survive if taken away from the city and its resources and dumped in a provincial park someplace?
John B
Moving animals is generally discouraged both by scientists and the law. I’m not sure about deer, but for other animals when you plunk them down into an unfamiliar territory they often have trouble adapting and they die anyway, and they compete with animals already in the area for resources potentially causing the death of animals that were perfectly fine in a balanced ecosystem.
There’s also a risk of transporting a disease with the animals, introducing a new disease into a region.
This is a human-made problem. In the natural world deer are not at the top of the food chain, but we’ve created areas where they are, and they’re “destroying” (I would argue that “changing” may be more accurate), the parks they’re in. IMO we should find a way to keep the deer out of the forest if we don’t want them doing what deer do, add predators to the forest, or accept the role of predators ourselves.
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Kate
A report is out Thursday on the form to be taken by the new neighbourhoods to grow up on the site of the Molson brewery and the old Maison Radio-Canada. The OCPM wants less space for businesses, more social housing, fewer motor vehicles and more space for pedestrians and cyclists.
DeWolf
The OCPM clearly means well but it often makes recommendations that will have unintended consequences down the road. Restricting the amount of commercial space in a high-density neighbourhood is a good way to ensure you’re building car-dependent bedroom communities right in the heart of the city. That’s especially true given the relatively isolated location of the brewery lands.
There needs to be room for dépanneurs, supermarkets, fruiteries, fishmongers, cafés, restaurants, pet supply stores, veterinarians, pharmacies, bike repair shops. If you don’t allow developers to provide enough spaces for a full spectrum of neighbourhood shops, you’ll end up with a handful of banks, a corporate chain supermarket, maybe a Couche-Tard if you’re lucky. Independent businesses won’t be able to afford the rents when supply is so tightly restricted. Imagine a used bookstore opening in a neighbourhood where there is just half a dozen high-priced retail spaces.
We already have plenty of examples of what happens when you don’t integrate enough commercial space into new developments. The Faubourg Québec just east of Old Montreal is very densely populated, but it doesn’t have a single retail space and is completely lifeless as a result. Eliminating commercial activity certainly doesn’t seem to have helped the businesses in Old Montreal, either, because they’re beyond the 10-minute walking distance that most people are willing to tolerate for running daily errands. There still isn’t a supermarket in the entire area.
The Angus Yards development is another example. Again, there is not a single commercial space in any of the residential areas. All of the retail activity is clustered in one small area on the edge of the development. There’s a giant Provigo, an SAQ and some cafés and restaurants, but it’s generally quite car-oriented even though the nearby residential areas are fairly dense. Bois Franc suffers from the same problem. It’s filled with dense housing, but there’s hardly any commercial space, except for a little cluster filled with chain stores.
Back in the early 1980s, Montreal was also suffering from very high commercial vacancy rates and the same idea of restricting the supply was floated. The city actually wanted to rezone St-Viateur as a residential street, so that any empty retail spaces would need to be converted into housing units. Luckily there was enough opposition from the neighbourhood that they backed off. But you can still see the impact of such misguided policies around the city, where there are lots of ghost commercial blocks that have been converted into apartments, making neighbourhoods that much less convenient, walkable and lively.
Kate
It really depends on the context. I agree about needing food and basics on the street in the new development. The Faubourg Québec built just west of there – I’ve mentioned this before – is spooky in having zero commercial presence, not a dépanneur on its sterile streets, let alone a café or a bakery or a fruiterie. But there had been talk of putting mall‑type shopping in the redeveloped Maison Radio-Canada area at some point, which would be a different kind of distortion. I don’t think it needs shoe stores.
I so totally agree on the ghost blocks. There are some on Bernard and on Rachel and they deaden the whole vibe.
CE
Verdun is the worst for ghost blocks. So many commercial spaces turned into what I can’t imagine are very nice apartments. The older parts of Centre-Sud seems to have been peppered with lots of little corner shops, most of which have been converted to apartments. Imagine how much cheaper commercial spaces could be if more first floor spaces were shops?
John B
Verdun the neighbourhood or Verdun the street? For the neighbourhood which places are you thinking. Only the former garage on Gordon & the former copy shop at Galt & Verdun come to mind immediately.
Verdun the street has some sort of by-law where if a property that held a business business ceases to be a business for 2 years it can never become a business again and must be residential. So we end up with the former copy shop, or the apartment with the cheque machines sign above the door. I assume that the owners of the Anodization Verdun site are waiting for the 2-year period to end so they’re conveniently forced to build residential units.
Kate
Wow. The opposite should be true. If anyone wants to build a residential building on a commercial street, a permit should only be given to projects that have commercial space on the ground floor, keeping the street alive.
John B
My understanding is that Verdun Av used to have a very high concentration of pawn shops & deps, to the point where the council at the time decided they needed to do something about it so they passed this to try to tame the area a bit. Not the greatest solution in hindsight, but it was a different time.
Maybe someone with a longer history in Verdun knows more than I do.
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Kate
Analysis apparently shows that people choosing to leave the city for the suburbs were mostly already living around its periphery. Central city dwellers are more likely to stay entrenched. There will, of course, be plenty of exceptions – and I don’t agree with the writer of this piece that Villeray, St-Michel or Park Ex are peripheral.
In any case, the pandemic has hastened an exodus from the island as people go further afield seeking their dream house.
Joey
Ah yes, the exodus to the suburbs. Must be why every listing in the Plateau is selling for tens of thousands above asking with no conditions in 10 days…
Blork
Same thing is happening in the suburbs. Who could have expected the pandemic would cause a run on real estate?
Kevin
Joey
How many 3.5s being sold?JONATHAN
In my opinion the methodology makes it hard to make cross comparison. They looked at and ranked the postal codes as their main point of comparison. So H1Z ranked in their top 30 which is St Michel, in their analysis they then mention VSMPE even though it is only St Michel. It is 150 households of a total population of over 35,000 that moved to the burbs. Meanwhile H3C is ranked just one above St Michel with roughly the same number of households from a population of under 10,000 (this is the code including Griffintown).
They make grandiose claims based on not very robust (?) data. This is significant. I heard the mayor of VSMPE speaking about this article worrying that there is a problem in the borough. Ppl actually base their decisions on this information (house purchases, borough policies, election choices, etc). The media needs to be more critical and investigative. It took me 10 minutes to find proof of your suspicion that VSMPE is not really affected.
I’m not saying this is anything you should be doing. Just pointing out that media is failing all of us.
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Kate
It’s a joke: Quebec is giving $15 million to the Chamber of Commerce to “relaunch” Montreal’s downtown. That petty cash will disappear like old snow on a warm day with as little to show for it.
Ephraim
It’s not the petty cash… it’s the corrupt organization they gave it to. You know, the people who ripped off the city with Bixi, the people who managed to get a 3.5% tax on every tourist room in the city for Tourism and yet give no voice to those tourism businesses… but paid out at giant golden handshake when the head of the organization walked away. And the same people who own Montreal’s parking meters and pay the city pennies of the dollar.
Jonathan
Can’t speak to much of what Ephraim is saying, but the parking meters and lots have been reappropriated by the city a few years back. It’s now Agence de mobilité durable.
Ephraim
Only as of the 1st of January 2020. It started in 1995 and I think it was a 25 year contract in which Bourque sold the parking meters. They promised that they could bring in more money, more efficiently than the city and promised the city a 30% cut of the income. So, how did they improve the income… they started adding more meters and charging more for the meters. No magic there.
Like many “non-profits”, the game is… pay higher salaries to those at the top so that there isn’t a profit, rather than put it into programs. And that’s exactly what they did at BIXI… and ran it into bankruptcy, leaving the city of Montreal holding the loans. (And egg on it’s face, because it shouldn’t have been lending money in the first place).
As for Tourism Montreal, they collect a fee of 3.5% on all short term rentals. This is supposed to be spent on the promotion of tourism. But only if you pay them extra fees do you get any say in their budget or even their actions. They aren’t government, they don’t have to answer to anyone… they are quasi governmental. I think the last guy they pushed out, they ended up paying him a cool $700K+ when he left. Money that should have been spent to promote tourism…. but of course, doesn’t.
I’m in the tourism business. I asked for maps for my guests. At one time they completely refused to provide any. Eventually they decided I could have them, but I would have to run all the way to St-Laurent to collect them from their warehouse…. they aren’t for me… they are for the tourists, who are paying 3.5% extra to them and all they want is a damn printed MAP!
I think it is less than 25% of the hotels and other tourist accommodations that are actually members… because the other 75% don’t want to pay even more to Tourisme Montreal to get maps delivered.
Kevin
I think there is a serious disconnect between reality and what the Chamber of Commerce is expecting.
Michel Leblanc is claiming that productivity is down, and that people want to be in the office.
Stats Can shows that productivity rose dramatically during the lockdown phase last year, and dropped in the third quarter as hours worked by small businesses increased.
Which shows that when you need people to come to the workplace, the amount of output they produce declines. People who have jobs that let them work remotely are *more efficient* when working at home.Similarly, polls show that 2/3 of Canadians who have been working from home have no interest in resuming the commute to their office.
I understand Leblanc – he *needs* to have people coming downtown to work in order for all those spinoff businesses that rely on people being in the core buying lunch and wasting time — but I think he’s fighting a losing battle.
Joey 08:38 on 2021-03-19 Permalink
If things had gone according to plan, Denis Coderre would be president of the Expos by now…
Tim S. 17:27 on 2021-03-19 Permalink
From CBC’s description of the back cover:
On the back cover of his book, Coderre wrote about how much he’s changed since his defeat.
“I rebuilt myself physically and mentally, and I went to meet Montrealers from every neighbourhood, every condition, every origin, every generation,” he wrote.
“The more time passed, the more I understood that our relationship was not over.”
I may be confusing him with another public figure, but did not Ian call this several months ago?