Two entrepreneurs have a plan to convert three disused buildings on Park Avenue – including the one that used to be the Exxotica strip club – into an urban farm growing not only herbs and vegetables but also fish.
Updates from March, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
La Presse spotted a Léger poll about the recognition and popularity of various public and political figures and identified it as Projet Montréal testing the waters over who may be leading Ensemble into the November 2025 election.
This article says Projet fessed up – but wouldn’t this kind of information actually be more useful to Ensemble? Aref Salem has been their interim leader, but if they want to make a serious play for city hall in 2025 they’ll need to hold a leadership convention, and they should be considering who they’d try to recruit.
Ian
It’s worth noting that only in 2013, did PM get elected as the first municipal oppostition – what we see 10 years later in terms of opposition to to PM is very much based in the fact that before PM people weren’t running as part of a party, as opposedt organized around one leader.
Ensemble is still running off the Coderre handbook, and regardless of what anyone thinks of Plante or PM in general, they are organized on a way different level than any other municipal group. This is like the decades when the Habs seemed to win every Stanley cup – becasue they were the first team that paid its players to train in the summer, they were just organized at a much higher level.
Plante was kind of a nobody (albeit one with powerful friends) when she got airdropped in to fill a Bergeron-shaped hole. To extend the hockey metaphor, Ensemble might be better of focusing on the team instead of finding one goalie to pin all their hopes on. Any other party would have crashed and burned when Bergeron jumped ship to be on Team Coderre, PM just levelled up to being an actual party.
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Kate
The price of residential real estate in Montreal is surging. House prices rose from 10% to 15% in February.
Also the price of a small Plateau house has risen 65% in four years.
Blork
So much for high interest rates cooling the market. I really don’t know how people do it these days.
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Kate
The Globe and Mail has a piece this week on Montreal cuisine in London.
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Kate
Following the collapse of Just For Laughs, directors of other festivals are concerned about dwindling government grants and their capacity to continue providing the free entertainment that’s become expected here in season.
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Kate
Students at Concordia and McGill are to hold a strike soon against the Quebec government’s tuition hike for out‑of‑province students.
In a related theme, English‑language CEGEPs are going to lose most of their foreign‑language teachers as the schools gear up to teach only French. After all, who would ever need to know any other tongue?
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Kate
There were two stabbings overnight, one near Langelier metro, the other downtown. Nobody got murdered. The Journal headline un vol de téléphone qui tourne mal reads oddly – surely a phone theft is already “mal”?
azrhey
colloquially “qui tourne mal” means someone got hurt. something can be already mal, but if it “tourne mal” it means injuries on top of it.
Kate
Thanks, azrhey!
Ian
I’m guessing the equivalent English phrase would be “took a turn for the worse”.
Meezly 14:53 on 2024-03-10 Permalink
Looks like an interesting trend in the hood. Agriculture du Coin recently opened not far from there, a hub that provides workshops and equipment on growing food in your home.
Nicholas 15:25 on 2024-03-10 Permalink
Our island is surrounded by rich farmland, and we have a long history of also putting up greenhouses to have fresh produce year-round. We have a housing crisis, especially in the Plateau/Mile End, an area with excellent bike and bus connections. So we’re going to push in agriculture to a dense, walkable neighbourhood while pushing potential housing and neighbours out to sprawl into our agricultural lands and drive back into our city? All for (for-profit!) farming that’s going to create nuisance in our neighbourhoods (farming is not just rainbows and sunshine) or is going to be so unproductive per hectare (it will anyway) and have terrible carbon emissions per ton of food produced (more than eating up savings from no trucking) that it makes it an even more inefficient use of valuable land?
I’m on board with Lufa, those roofs were unused anyway, and I get community gardens because they are a nice hobby, people like gardening, and those in apartments can’t have gardens. But to turn housing (or potential for lots more on this land) in our densest borough into a farm during a housing crisis? For vibes?
Daniel 15:31 on 2024-03-10 Permalink
Nicholas, agreed on many of your points. I’m also a big supporter of local agriculture but this seems over the top. We can take comfort in the fact that this seems early days and rather pie-in-the-sky at this point. I’ll be surprised if this becomes real.
CE 16:16 on 2024-03-10 Permalink
A lot of these companies/organizations exist just to eat up grant money for environmental initiatives which other companies can then use for greenwashing purposes, to get access to tax credits, or even more grants for themselves. I’ve seen it over and over throughout the years. When the funding dries up, they go and do it with something else.
One egregious example of this I’ve seen was a company a friend of mine worked for that put planters on the roofs of skyscrapers. The plants would be destroyed by the wind and sun pretty quickly while the pitiful environmental benefits were cancelled out many times over by the amount of gas that needed to be burned trucking the plants from a warehouse in the suburbs to the top of the buildings. However, the companies who owned or leased the skyscrapers could use the service to check a box saying they were saving the environment and get tax credits.
And these people prey on orgaizations that actually want to do something for the environment. I volunteered with a non-profit at Concordia when I was a student and there was this guy who was constantly pitching all these stupid gimmicks that would ultimately have little to no positive impact on the environment. One of his pitches was rejected outright because it would have required them to put up a big sign saying the initiative was sponsored by TD.
Meezly 16:46 on 2024-03-10 Permalink
I had commented without opening the article – so it’s actually the owners of Agricultural du Coin who purchased those buildings!
I don’t understand the negativity though. It’s been depressing walking by these boarded up buildings for YEARS. Two of the commercial buildings had been sitting empty since 2021 due to a fire. The third building that housed Exxotica has also been unused since 2021, and it had a commercial unit on the 2nd floor and a residential apartment on the 3rd floor. So only one residence would be lost in all this.
I believe the commercial space that is now Agriculture du Coin on Laurier had also been empty for years. It now also serves as a Lufa pick up point for the neighbourhood, which has been amazing since that particular area has been bereft of Lufa pick up points for some time now.
Maybe this indoor farming is a gimmicky trend, but as someone who lives in that area, I’m happy to see these buildings being put to use again.
Ian 17:40 on 2024-03-10 Permalink
I think you’d be hard-pressed to find people willing in exxotica anyway, the ghosts in there would be especially unhappy having been steeped in human misery for so long. I used to live right across the street from there and I have seen things even from the outside that made me shudder.
Blork 17:54 on 2024-03-10 Permalink
Sounds like a great idea. I’m not convinced it will be successful for all sorts of reasons (primarily cost of setup and maintenance resulting in prohibitively high product costs I would think). But if they can make a go of it then that’s great news for people in the neighbourhood who like to eat salads.
I’m not even being snarky; I eat leafy salads probably 5-6 days a week, and finding edible lettuce is always a bit of a challenge, especially this time of year (and I’m not crazy on lettuce with a big carbon footprint but my desire for leafy salads is stronger). My local Provigo has been selling “living lettuces” which are (AFAIK) grown in either Quebec or Ontario, so that’s been fantastic (only drawback is the packaging, which is just a flimsy plastic bag, but still). Unfortunately they haven’t had any for the past month or so. I don’t know if it’s part of the store’s recent do-over (new owner shaking things up) or if it’s just a seasonal shortage.
Nicholas 02:56 on 2024-03-11 Permalink
You may remember the Mirabel Boston lettuce. They’re now Gen V, and have a few kinds, and I see them at various grocery stores (saw some today in fact at Super C, on special). They produce 34 million heads a year, and are based in St Jerome, with a few other greenhouses near cities. They also have cucumbers and peppers, and it’s organic and hydroponic, without pesticides and uses a tenth of the water as normal lettuce. And they do this all on 30 hectares, which is about the size of the block of Park that these buildings are on, both sides of the street, and everything behind it on that side of Jeanne Mance. One and a half small blocks produce 4 heads of lettuce per Quenecker per year, and more produce. You can do incredible things with greenhouses, like a place in Vaudreuil that grows strawberries vertically year round, sold at some IGAs. The Dutch have mastered this, and Quebec has done a fair bit.
If the buildings can’t be put to good use, seemingly as commercial, maybe we can tear down the two-storey buildings and replace them with four-storey apartments. Make them affordable if you can get subsidies or market rate if not, people will be happy to live there and not, say, Chambly, it’ll keep rents down in the neighbourhood a tad. We can probably fit 50 people in there just at 4 storeys, and make a greenhouse in Chambly on what could become another subdivision where most people drive. Not every building in the city needs heritage protection.
Ian 08:24 on 2024-03-12 Permalink
While I think your vision for urban renewal has its charms, it’s worth noting that there is a building almost exactly one block north that is designed more or less according to what you suggest as “better’ for the Exxxotica site – and its commercial space has stood empty since videotron stopped renting videos.
There are tons of vacant spaces on that strip, our problem right now isn’t increasing density, it’s increasing occupancy … And all the new residential condo spaces in Mile End are 1 or 2 bedrooms max. The main way to keep residential rent down in Mile End is to slow gentrification, not building even more tiny units that drive up the prices on the few 2 and 3 bedroom units on the market.