Le Devoir made a visit to Café Cléopâtre this week.
Updates from August, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
One of the things that used to give Montreal a reputation as a great place to study was its plentiful cheap apartments. Not any more. Like everyone else, students are facing harsh rent hikes and, as a result, are cramming into tiny apartments – which can’t make life any easier if you need to study and work and have a peaceful place to sleep.
SMD
Related, a longtime artists’ paper factory is shutting down due in part to lack of employees. As the co-founder puts it in today’s Le Devoir:
« Quand Montréal était une ville moins chère, elle attirait des artistes de partout, qui venaient travailler pour nous à leurs débuts. Les artistes n’ont plus les moyens de vivre à Montréal, les ateliers et les appartements y sont trop chers. On a perdu notre meilleure source de main-d’oeuvre. »
Kate
I was just about to post that item, SMD. I’ve been in that paper factory – even when I was there, a few years ago, the owners knew it was only a matter of time before they were swept away by rising rents or landlord plans for the building. It’s like a medieval workshop down there.
Kevin
I think rent and housing price increases are making people realize that if you want something to stick around you really have to spend time, energy, and money making it succeed.
Ian
That’s one of the things that made creative places like Montreal real hotbeds though, the risk was lower and you could try all kinds of wacky stuff. San Francisco was like that in the 50s and 60s. Soho was like that in the 70s and 80s. Portland and Berlin were like that in the 90s. Brooklyn was like that in the 00’s.
You need density, space, and low rents, but then it gets “cool” and the realtors & tourists swoop in. Once it gets expensive, all the risk-takers vanish, and all the stuff that keeps getting made becomes very “safe”.
FWIW art supplies were always weirdly expensive, there are a number of artist co-ops in Montreal with wholesale credentials that have been around for. along time just so we could get art supplies from the US at decent prices.
Chris
And bringing half a million immigrants every year (that’s about one Kitchener a year, our 10th biggest city) of course increases demand greatly, with supply not being built to match. (But don’t mention that, or you’re racist!)
Kevin
The housing problem long predates recent immigration targets. Canada has been underbuilding housing for decades — and even then, much of the housing built was of the wrong type (one-bedroom apartments or luxury homes).
Combine that with nobody planning for boomers to live longer than any other generation and their collective decision to age in place in large ’empty nest’ houses instead of downsizing to those one-bedroom condos or retirement homes, along with the unprecedented surge toward hybrid workplaces putting even more pressure on the low supply of family-sized homes, the decades-old trend toward couples devoting a greater percentage of their spending toward housing, and the lack of skilled tradesworkers among everyone Gen X and younger — and our country is faced with a problem of needing to either retrain a generation in the trades — or to import immigrants who are skilled at the trades in order to build housing for themselves and others.
Bryan
@Chris I was under the impression that annual immigration has been closer to 250,000 people for the most of the last 20 years.
waffles
Publicly owned, sustainable builds are needed, sure, but all this ‘we need to build more housing’ is playing into developper’s hands (and they build crap, look around)
There’s plenty of empty apartments & homes for everyone right now. There needs to be a mass redistribution of housing. Seize properties from housing hoarders.
Families should only own 1-2 dwellings, all apartment buildings should be converted to renter co-ops, and individuals should only be allowed to rent out living quarters if they also live in the building. All rental units should be inspected for upkeep,health & safety every year, like restaurants.
walkerp
A much bigger factor is the globalization of money, allowing foreign wealth to buy property in Canada which turned real estate into an investment vehicle. It’s basically a distribution of vertical wealth within a country to horizontal wealth across countries, the horizontal line being people with enough money to invest in a property outside their home country.
PatrickC
Not directly on topic, but there’s an interesting article comparing Quebec and Ontario housing policies, with a warning that Quebec’s affordability advantage is disappearing:
https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/august-2023/affordable-housing-quebec-ontario/Tim
@Waffles: Canada, as a whole, has the least amount of housing per 1000 of the G7. The country needs 1.8 million new homes to get to the G7 average. There is not enough supply for our population.
Kevin
walkerp
A hard disagreement from me. The bigger issue is the generational shift in dual-income Canadian families devoting an ever-increasing percentage of their income to housing, combined with the ability to take equity from a building that’s not paid for and use it to get another mortgage to buy another property. Foreign owners, even in BC, only a small sliver of upscale housing.Ten percent of owners in BC own 30% of the market. Most people who own multiple properties own their own home and a second rental property as an investment vehicle.
Retirement fund managers have been pushing income properties instead of stocks/bond/mutual funds for a long time.
The fix will require all hands on deck — including governments going back to what was done post-WWII and building housing directly. https://placecentre.smartprosperity.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Working-Together-to-Build-1.5-Million-Homes-August-17-FINAL.pdf
SMD
A solid riposte to the claim that immigration is driving up housing prices: https://breachmedia.ca/media-wrongly-blames-immigration-canada-home-prices/.
qatzelok
It’s not “an immigration” thing, it’s about supply and demand. If the supply is outstripped by demand (because of population growth) then house prices go up. Increasing population can be done through natural growth or immigration.
But if a country’s elites INTENTIONALLY underbuild housing in order to get rich off of real estate, then we have a corruption problem. A large number of Canada’s MPs are landlords who make a lot of money when there are not enough houses for our growing population.
https://www.readthemaple.com/mp-landlords/
Are we being gamed into homelessness by our own governments?
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Kate
Millions in movie production funds stashed in a Montreal bank account may have been defrauded from a production company. It’s a complicated story hinting at the kind of international deals that go into making a feature film.
Meezly
That’s quite the scoop from La Presse. I tried googling that story and only found a filed contract/fraud suit and tentative court ruling between THC and Rakuten. It’s not even covered yet by Variety or The Hollywood Reporter.
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Kate
Le Monde has a short item on those francisation stickers placed around Park Extension recently. Le Monde is blunt enough to describe the new language law as “une nouvelle loi restreignant l’usage de l’anglais dans la ville québécoise” whereas here, the official line is always that the intention is to save French, not repress English.
Bob
Well, the official line is nonsense. It has never been about preserving French, and we know this because of the Quebec government’s attitude toward minority language rights outside of Quebec – let French die in the ROC for the sake of killing English in Quebec.
The whole idea of “preserving” a language is perverse conservatism – and that’s why it comes up in right-wing, racist contexts, like the “preservation” of English in the US. Which French is being “preserved”? How far back do we go to find that “pure” French without foreign influences? French is not pure, it’s a mash of many languages, as are pretty much all the languages whose purity right-wing racists worry about. On the stickers: “Lait. Poulet. Navet.” Latin, Spanish, and Latin. “Feta. Gouda. Tapioca.” Greek, Dutch, and Guarani via Portugeuse. “Bonbon. Rayon. Melon” Latin, Old German, Latin. But never English (45% of whose words are of French origin)! When you ask for more cheese on your Greek salad(French) at a restaurant(French) on Park(French) Avenue(French), you had better use the French(French) version(French) of “feta”!
Chris
>The whole idea of “preserving” a language is perverse conservatism – and that’s why it comes up in right-wing, racist contexts
Hmm, does that include the countless CBC articles about preserving Native American languages?
jeather
True, when you strip the term “preserving a language” of any context about which language is being preserved, what they mean by preserved (from change vs from death, as an example), and why that language needs to be preserved, it does mean that “preserving English/French” is as neutral as “preserving [Indigenous language x]”, which is also never called “revitalizing” because Indigenous languages which have in the dozens or hundreds of speakers are in the same situation as English and French which have in the tens or hundreds of millions of native speakers alone.
Kevin
Chris
Only if you confuse languages with ethnicities, as is deliberately done by MBC et al.
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