The empty office spaces in Montreal are said to add up to 13 Place Ville Marie towers, but the need for residential space doesn’t mean conversion of offices to apartments would be easy.
Updates from January, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
What does it mean to say that the building owner “believes” that the shortcut from Bonaventure metro to the REM will soon open? Shouldn’t they know?
Jonathan
I imagine there are a lot of things to consider, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it weren’t something to do with insurance. If there is an official entrance to the network, it probably has an impact.
Ian
Given how flexible delivery dates for projects are I think it’s just prudent to use that kind of phrasing.
Faiz Imam
This entire saga his been so odd. Everyone assumed from day 1 that this would be a normal access, but when it opened it was only an exit.
They never gave a explicit reason and have been dancing around the topic for months.
Whatever it is, it must be highly legal.
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Kate
Quebec and Ottawa are putting $6.2 million into modernizing Centaur Theatre.
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Kate
Hydro-Quebec’s state monopoly on the sale of electricity, a cornerstone of modern Quebec, is in the sights of the CAQ government. Pierre Fitzgibbon wants to allow private companies to sell current to other private companies – likely the thin end of the wedge for complete privatization.
steph
Hydro Quebec is a gem. A great crown corporation that will always be profitable.
Ontario has sold Hydro One at a valuation of roughly ten years of profit. Hydro One would have made Ontario profits for hundreds of years. This is nuts. Ontarians were robbed for short term “balancing the budget”. I hope we don’t let this shame happen in Quebec. Neoliberalism is robbing us left and right. They privatise profits while they socialize risk.
Ian
Very much a goose that lays golden eggs. Ford Nation should serve as a caution, not an inspiration.
DeWolf
The one thing that could save Hydro-Quebec from eventually being privatized is that it’s a cornerstone of modern Quebec identity. People here have far more attachment to Hydro-Quebec as a symbol than Ontarians ever did with their provincial hydro company.
qatzelok
DeWolf, while it’s true that Hydro-Quebec is an important symbol here, it is also an important means of funding our social programs. Moreso than Hydro One ever was for Ontario.
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Kate
Toula Drimonis lays into Yves‑François Blanchet and his complaint that Montreal is too multicultural and thus not Quebec enough.
Kevin
I think Blanchet here is playing the same game as PP: Montrealers aren’t going to vote for him anyway, so he may as well toss his base some red meat and get them angry.
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Kate
Weekend notes from CityCrunch, CultMTL, Sarah’s Weekend List.
Madonna performed here Thursday night and will perform here again Saturday.
More interesting is that the new women’s hockey team will face Toronto for the first time Saturday at the Verdun Auditorium.
Quotes of the week from CultMTL.
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Kate
English is everywhere in the area newly designated as the “quartier de la francophonie”. The city’s going to have to do something about this, facing the dilemma that English signs are bad, but the area is largely pitched at tourists who speak English.
PatrickC
It’s not just about tourists. To pick up a point you made yesterday about the former prevalence of non-French names, I think there have been important demographic as well as imaginative changes in the city. There are many fewer anglophones than there used to be, but they are distributed differently than they used to be (more of them in the Plateau, Sud-Ouest, etc.), in neighbourhoods that used to be more homogeneously francophone. A corresponding redistribution of francophones to other areas is less remarked (Westmount was never exclusively anglo and is currently 20% franco, I believe). But what’s different now is that imaginative compartmentalization of the kind that used to prevail in franco as well as anglo life is no longer possible. Erasing the other has become more a matter of will.
Ian
One thing I have noticed about tourist areas all over the world is that it is possible to get service in many languages. Like, that’s kind of the point.
Uatu
Just change it back to Quartier Latin. Nobody seemed to care about the signs back when it was called that.
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Kate
The only suspect in last March’s fatal fire in Old Montreal is trying to deflect guilt onto some other unnamed person. Denis Bégin is a career criminal known to be a manipulator, as recounted here by La Presse’s crime reporters.
But if Bégin saw the fire being lit, what was he doing there and why didn’t he report it? It seems from the tone of their account that Renaud and Larouche don’t believe the story any more than the police do.
DeWolf
I read that story when it first came out and… wow. This guy is something else. Who would have thought a guy involved in the biker bar bombing that killed a child was also involved in this horrific fire?
Tim S. 18:10 on 2024-01-19 Permalink
I lived opposite an office building that was converted into condos, and they basically gutted it down to the concrete frame and then rebuilt from there. Took three years, which may be partly because of the incompetence of the developers but still, a big job.
DeWolf 18:49 on 2024-01-19 Permalink
It’s extremely difficult and expensive to convert most office towers to residential. The only way to make it work on a large scale is to offer generous subsidies, which Calgary has been doing since 2021. That has managed to convert 2.3 million square feet of office space into residential (if you include pending projects that haven’t yet started construction) but that’s still a long way off from the city’s goal of converting 6 million square feet.
Montreal would benefit from doing something similar, but there’s still a need for office space – so maybe there should also be incentives for building owners to rent out vacant space to community groups, NGOs and other organizations like that.
Ian 19:02 on 2024-01-19 Permalink
I know some companies that do this very thing. The biggest issue? Outdated HVAC, yes, but even more … Toilets. Most office buildings only have a few toilets per floor but crazy as it sounds, people want one in every single apartment. On the other hand, they mostly have EXCELLENT internet infrastructure.
That said, old office buildings barely need anything to be used for homeless shelters …open concept spaces and a few toilets per floor isn’t a detriment for that use.
Some conversions are easier than others. Hotels make great resdiences for students. Old convents, orphanages, and hospitals make great old age homes. Old ground-level malls make great accessible community spaces.
I remember when the old CBC building in Toronto was abandoned – the problem was that all the spaces were simply too small to be retrofitted and yeah, it had to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt wihtin the shell – it’s much cheaper to just build new (especially as we don’t have mandatory parking rules) but nobody would grant a demo permit for a heritage building even in Toronto. At first, anyhow.
In any case this has been a calanity waiting to happen for a while. Most of the office space for rent downtown is considered too old & run down to be really desirable, and all the property management companies specializing in that like Canderel, Ivanhoe and Fairview are saddled with these white elephants they were having problems renting out even before covid. That’s why they were trying to build condo projects as much as they could, it’s an easier sell and not their problem 30 years later.
Nicholas 20:13 on 2024-01-19 Permalink
One big issue is you’re not allowed (art 51) to have a closed bedroom without a window or other natural light (like a skylight or light well, and you can use shared light from another room with restrictions). Having a large square building footprint with a large interior space with no windows is fine for an open concept office, or even when exterior offices have glass walls, but that doesn’t work for residential. You then have to put the bedrooms on the exterior walls/windows, meaning the shared living space mostly doesn’t have access to natural light or you have this interior space you can’t use. It just makes building floor plans really tricky. Residential buildings tend to be much more rectangular (larger footprints are often in an L or U shape), but it’s hard to retrofit a square.
Also this law is not for safety (egress), but for mental health. That’s arguable, but it’s still the law, and shady landlords may get around it, but massive buildings downtown won’t.
Kevin 21:23 on 2024-01-19 Permalink
Nicholas
This is a problem that can be fixed by altering the access points to a building.
If a place has multiple stairwells, it should have multiple entrances, and we have to be creative with room placement.
Michael 23:27 on 2024-01-19 Permalink
Calgary subsidized 75$/sq ft. Thats a lot of money. Thats probably what it would take to get them converted here.
Mark 09:12 on 2024-01-20 Permalink
These folks have done an assessment of over a thousand potential conversions. They came up with a conversion score to see if it makes sense to flip commercial to residential, and I think the average in North America is around 25% that are suitable….so not enough to rely on that as the only option but that’s still a lot of square footage.
Big variations by city, Boston scored very low (10%), due to the age and heterogeneity of their office stock. Calgary was high, as a lot of their office space was built at the same time (70s) with similar specs, so once you figure out the formula to convert one building, it can be applied to many others.
https://www.gensler.com/blog/what-we-learned-assessing-office-to-residential-conversions
jeather 11:28 on 2024-01-20 Permalink
99% invisible did an episode about the issues converting office space to residential space in NYC that I found very informative.
Mozai 11:47 on 2024-01-20 Permalink
“People want a toilet in their apartment…” I was told the ½ of “this apartment is a 3½” was an ensuite toilet. Which suggested to me one could rent in Montreal a “3 room” or “2 room” apartment that doesn’t have its own ensuite toilet but something shared with other units. Futhermore, I’ve seen basement apartments that have only one room in the entire unit with a window. So, maybe the office buildings could be turned into terrible apartments. It’s not impossible just awful.
MarcG 13:03 on 2024-01-20 Permalink
Ian’s post inspired me to suggest that the solution is for everyone to become homeless but I thought better of saying it out loud… but then Mozai kind of said it anyway.
Ian 14:00 on 2024-01-20 Permalink
Well TBH I didn’t mean it as a solution …
@Mozai I have seen places listed as a “6” becasue it was a 51/2 with a separate “water closet” and “bathroom”. I’m actually sad that’s not more standard, it makes shared living space much better.