Montreal did well jobs-wise in the pandemic
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 13:58 on 2021-04-25 Permalink
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 15:02 on 2021-04-25 Permalink
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 09:27 on 2021-04-26 Permalink
@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 13:10 on 2021-04-26 Permalink
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 14:31 on 2021-04-26 Permalink
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 16:24 on 2021-04-26 Permalink
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 00:27 on 2021-04-27 Permalink
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.