A protest against metro security brutality was held Sunday, marching from Jarry Park to Jean‑Talon metro station, where the most recent incident involving disproportionate security response occurred last week.
Updates from April, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The port longshoremen, planning a general strike to start Monday, may be forced back to work by the federal government.
steph
I’m never going to understand how the government can force workers back to work. Buisness is buisness, even essential services.
Kate
They can fine the union, I think. I don’t know whether they can fine the individual members.
su
There is a huge restructuring and expansion of our port going on, and hence alot of effects on port workers. https://canadiansailings.ca/port-of-montreal-building-for-the-future-major-projects-moving-forward-at-a-rapid-pace/
Lots more international goodies will be passing through and hence lots of work schedule adjustments are underway.Kate
Thank you, su. Very good info.
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Kate
A man was shot in Montreal North on Sunday afternoon, but not much more is said about the incident, except that he’s known to police.
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Kate
CultMTL says Montreal lost fewer jobs during the pandemic than any comparable city in North America. They quote Plateau mayor Luc Rabouin as also saying “2020 was a record year for the number of projects and jobs created by foreign investment.”
Kevin
This whole page is a litany of posts about how the city is undergoing fundamental change.
Fewer jobs lost because so many jobs in our city are able to be done remotely.
Rents are up because people want larger places so they can continue to work from home in comfort.We don’t need more studios and 3 1/2s – that’s old school thinking — so building tonnes of them in skyscrapers is pointless. People thinking of buildings higher than Mount Royal look to Vancouver — and yet that city has far too many single family homes a short distance from the city core, and not enough multi-family buildings.
The simplest/better option would be to transform office towers into housing, because there is no way that all that office space is still needed.
And commercial building owners know it too. I spoke with an electrician this week who has been working 6 days a week on large commercial space being chopped up into smaller units appropriate for the ‘come in once a week’ workplace.
david44
Well, demand for condos in downtown towers and everywhere else is very high right now, and new project starts are continuing apace, so clearly there’s plenty of demand for all the “old school thinking.” So that’s just incorrect. And rents aren’t going up in all segments of the market, though obviously they’re going up more quickly in the single family homes.
But you’re right that there should be a lot more multi-family buildings and that the single family home only zoning should go the way of the dodo, and you’re right that the city should remove minimize the friction on residential conversions of office towers.
Bill Binns
@Kevin – I think you may get your wish of seeing office towers converted to residences.
The dark side of all this success in working remotely (productivity at my wife’s large financial services firm is through the roof) is a coming crash in commercial real estate. Even pre-pandemic there was huge pressure to downsize on office space. In my travels through the oil industry it wasn’t unusual to see Senior VP’s making 200k a year working in open cubicles. The pandemic has been a large scale proof of concept for working from home for entire industries.
Even more scary is that companies must be asking themselves why they need to pay Montreal salaries when they could just as easily employ someone working from home from Drummondville or Rimouski for 30% less.
Mark Côté
That latter bit is a conversation happening all over the tech industry. Salaries at many bigger companies have been pegged to location, with Bay Area people being paid way more than people in other major US cities who are paid way more than people in major Canadian cities. With many places allowing more remote work or even going fully remote, the justification for paying someone in SF $300k when you can pay someone in Wisconsin $150k for the same job is evaporating.
Not that consolidating talent in one specific area when they are building worldwide networks has made much sense for the last 20 years anyway…
Kevin
The question I have is how much can a company drop its wages without getting crap work in return and/or facing legislative pushback. Especially in tech, where many companies in Quebec get government incentives of some sort.
On the other hand, I know the owner of one small software firm who eliminated the office entirely and while many employees are in Montreal, several are in Europe and Asia.
Mark Côté
For software I don’t think it’ll make much of a difference. I doubt there’s any difference in average pay between a software dev who used to work in an office in Montreal vs a remote employee somewhere else in Quebec. There were far fewer remote positions before last year, but I imagine pay was roughly the same in remote vs office.
For reference, I am at my second remote-friendly software job. One company did bump Toronto- and Vancouver-area salaries slightly, but other than that there was only one set of salary bands for all the rest of Canada. My current employer has no distinction within Canada.
Mark Côté
Rereading this I realize I’m sounding contradictory… I don’t think high-tech salaries in Canada will be influenced by an increase in remote work because (relatively speaking) they are still low, but the ludicrous salaries in SF may come down over time.
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Kate
La Presse looked at rents and available apartments, and the story is not a hopeful one. Example: an apartment in Anjou that was rented for $675 in 2016, now posted for $1400.
Salaries have not risen all that much in five years. How are people managing this?
david124
Need to hammer the rentier class by torching the.value of their investments. Upzone 100% ot Anjou and let the mom and pop builders loose! You won’t get this everywhere, and it won’t happen overnight, but in Anjou your new build unit will come to market at around the same $1400. Laugh at the would-be rentier as he watches.the value.of his investment shrink year in, year out with each new unit that goes up.
steph
IMHO the upzone’d new construction is so badly built, it’s all going to be scrap in the blink of an eye.
Robert H
«Et lorsqu’un logement est demeuré vacant pendant 12 mois, son propriétaire n’est plus tenu d’en fixer le prix par rapport à l’ancien loyer, rappelle-t-il.» Pour le propriétaire, c’est presqu’une incitation!
Avant meme de le lire, c’est assez déprimant de voir les photographies, quel cauchemare.
What a dump.
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Kate
Denis Coderre thinks the city should allow buildings higher than Mount Royal, while the mayor does not. It’s entirely typical of Coderre that what he wants it for is to have a “world class downtown” and, only on second thoughts, to help with the housing crunch. His first thought is always to boost Montreal to make himself more of a big shot – and that’s if he gets to be mayor again.
Will adding to the stock of tiny downtown condos actually help the housing crisis? Is that what and where we need to build?
SU
He stated his intention to backtrack the 20/20/20 housing bylaw which I believe has just come into effect. He is worried that an affordable housing bylaw will be hard on the development community..
I guess he hopes to improve the plight of development investors by allowing them a few more floors.Uatu
Any idea in Montreal that’s touted as world class usually ends up being an expensive white elephant.
Kate
I don’t get the “world class” target. Montreal is an alpha-minus class city. We’re not in the top couple of ranks, and that’s fine! We don’t have the history, the economy, the population or the geography to be in those ranks, and until recently it made the city a lively but affordable place to live. Pushing it to compete with Paris, London and New York risks making the city unlivable for its residents while always trailing Toronto. Is this a competition we even want to be in?
david344
Raising the height limits would be fine, but it’s not going to bring any more housing in a way that impacts the housing crisis. Building that tall is far to expensive to happen all that regularly, and you’ll not see very much of it. What you’d get would be the odd signature or prestige building.
On the other question though, the whole 20-20-20 proposal – it’s a very stupid and goofy plan and it needs to go. We’re not seeing its result yet because all the developers rushed their projects through before it went into effect. But there’s no question that certain projects just don’t pencil out with that policy in place. Why don’t they pencil? It’s not just that you have to sell some units at a lower cost (in some cases than costs to even build them, so that you’re taking a loss!), it’s that you have to make up that lost revenue by increasing the cost of the units you do bring to market. Forget all the extra risk this entails, the key point is that new structures will be built only for the market in which they can sell. So, as a result of this scheme, some projects will pause until the price of housing rises high enough to warrant building, and whatever does get brought to market will be more costly, with knock on inflationary effects across the sector (as new units set the ceiling on the value of existing units).
Plus, for all this disruption they’ve made the classic mistake too: people who get units in these buildings will have to pay the building management fee like anyone else. It’s a classic scenario in other towns with schemes like this (eg. NYC or SF) and shows just how little research PM did before implementing this: monthly building management fees of $800 or $1000 are no problem for the buyer of the $700,000 condo, but challenging for most low income people qualified to buy the $250,000 condo in the same building. So who will really get these units? People who qualify based on their income, but who have significant means – well set retirees, foreigners with undeclared income back home, those whose main source of income is either off the books or passive, and so forth. So the PM position of “poor people who couldn’t otherwise afford it should also get to live a nice new luxury building just like the people who can afford it” is really just going to be a reward for those who manage to game the system.
Just kill this stupid scheme and fix the supply side in the normal way: build enough new housing that the cost of the old housing slides.
Tim S.
David, do you have any examples of places that have done it right, in your opinion?
qatzelok
When I hear the expression “world class city,” my bu****it-detector goes off.
What about yours?
steph
@david344 – “build enough new housing that the cost of the old housing slides.”
In the last six months the cost of building home has increased roughly $50,000. The construction supply industry has just begun feeling the full effect of any shortages. Lets see post-Covid what happens with all that. I suspect prices are simply NOT going to come down.David658
I wrote a long response to you Tim, but it seems it was lost. Anyway, the key elements there were that Seattle actually did exactly what I’m talking about – huge building boom led to lower rents in many areas, and a very low rate of increase (sub 2%) overall, which is wild. I something about Sacramento, Berkeley, and Oregon too, places I’m following
Steph – the most radical cost increase is the price of lumber. It’s down to a bottleneck at the processing points, and there’s a very good reason to believe this will come down as capacity ramps back up to 100%+ capacity. Namely, raw timber log cost is lower than ever. Various other inputs are higher on higher shipping costs (how stupid is it that we still haven’t developed robust value added capacity to bring our own natural resources to market?) – these shipping costs are already tumbling on the gradual resumption of China-US route frequency.
Kate
David∞ – it’s always a good policy, if you’re writing more than a couple of sentences, to compose in a text file on your own computer then cut and paste.
Tim S.
Thanks David – that gives me something to look into.
Kevin
I heard that demand in Canada was so strong for lumber that last year was the first time anyone remembered hitting the actual quota for harvesting set by the Crown.
At some point this past month the lumber futures were so high that sawmills started buyback programs, getting their wood *back* from lumber yards.
I figure it’ll stabilize when people can spend money travelling again.
Cadichon
David, I agree that raising the height limit dowtown would bring very few more units. But not sure “ending single family zoning” would make a difference in Montreal. Aside from RDP-PAT, Pierrefonds and Île-Bizard, there’s not much land zoned “R-1” in Montréal. (I checked quickly, in Montréal-Nord alone, probably less than 5% of all land.) As for the 20-20-20, there is some confusion in your point : affordable housing in Montréal, unlike in the US, is generally built in a separate structure, through provincial and federal programs. There is no management fee issues.
mare
I found a sheet of ¾” furniture grade plywood at the Home Depot that was cheaper than a sheet of rough plywood commonly used for roofs and floors. I postponed that part of the job for now, I don’t pay $65 for a piece of plywood if I can avoid it.
Building houses is expensive, but I’ve read stories of builders/developers of new subdivisions (in the US) who increased the selling price of every house with 40% after the previous house was sold and it was still sold fast for that price so they increased the price again and again.
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Kate
This story leads with generalizations about how gangs are giving guns to minors to do crappy jobs for them, but then gets to the real story about how a couple of boys – who didn’t even seem to know how the gun worked – shot at the wrong business last week in TMR and got caught. Reading between the lines, the judge is keeping them locked up for a week to teach them a lesson about the consequences of having gang friends.
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Kate
A man was the victim of a drive-by shooting Saturday evening in Côte-des-Neiges.
Another man was stabbed outside Berri-UQÀM metro around the same time.
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