A young man was stabbed in St‑Michel early Wednesday, and won’t help cops find his assailant.
Updates from March, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Deaths on the Santé Québec Covid page have quietly ticked up to 20,005.
…And nobody has mentioned this fact in the media.
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Kate
The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation finds that other Canadian cities are building apartments relatively fast, but Montreal isn’t.
Blork
It’s not like we’re not building though. I recently updated my panorama comparison of the René-Lévesque corridor (2012-2014) where it shows 23 new buildings put up in that time, most — probably ALL — of which are residential. Plus there’s all that stuff in Griffintown and a few other development hotspots. But it’s not really the right KIND of residential, is it?
Arguably, some of the people filling those shiny and tiny condos (some of which are rentals) are vacating more affordable apartments elsewhere in the city, creating vacancies for others to fill. But does it really work like that? Sounds good in theory…
MarcG
That’s a wild image, thanks for sharing.
MarcG
Where can one find the names of the buildings linked to the numbers?
Blork
Not from me. The numbers are just for enumeration purposes and in case any commenters want to refer to a specific building.
Ian
My partner used to work for a big property development company, we hears\d all kinds of crazy stories about the construction/urbanism disconnect – all the Tour Canadiens units sell off like hotcakes but entire floors basically stand empty as they were bought as “investments”.
Kate
A few years ago I did some contract work on a fancy book about a then‑new condo development in Toronto. The development was explicitly pitched at people from China already living in Toronto who would be buying additional condo units as investments. So that doesn’t surprise me at all.
CE
I have a friend who had a job a few years ago cleaning airbnbs in the Tour des Canadiens and she said the place was empty. Most units were unoccupied, a few were airbnbs. The whole time she was going there she only met a single actual occupant. I think this is pretty normal for a lot of these buildings.
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Kate
The mayor has announced a program for protecting tenants, the Responsible Landlord program, in particular by doing more inspections on older buildings especially in areas with more poverty. Item notes that 60% of the city’s residents are tenants.
Where are the poorer neighbourhoods now? The traditionally working class hoods in Sud‑Ouest and around Hochelaga‑Maisonneuve have been vigorously gentrifying for years.
The prime minister also says the impending federal budget will include help for tenants, which La Presse notes will almost certainly annoy Quebec.
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Kate
The perky headline on this CBC piece saying that fireworks aren’t that bad for Montreal’s air quality is swiftly contradicted in the second paragraph: “pollutants released by the explosives tended to drift into nearby neighbourhoods where they reach harmful levels.”
In addition, an expert is quoted saying “fireworks displays are a tradeoff between the economic benefit they bring and the not insignificant air pollution they cause.” But that’s just a microcosm of every polluting industry everywhere.
rob
Don`t take my fireworks away. I like the loud banging noise.
Chris
>The smog from the wildfires caused the city’s air quality to plummet and led to the cancellation of fireworks displays. While they would have been a negligible contributor to smog, according to the study, Weichenthal said conducting a fireworks display when air quality is already bad would not make a lot of sense.
lol. But god forbid we ban, or reduce, car usage during wildfire smog days. That must continue unabated!
Ian
lol, god forbid anyone live outside the immediate range of the STM.
How do you think people that live in the not-urban parts of this province live?
Fireworks are clearly a frivolity, drawing a prallel between an exploding art show local to Montreal and transportation for all of Qubec is a real apples & oranges move.
Unless you were advocating for more public transportation with an increased schedule on smog days, because then I’m all in.
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Kate
There’s a photo of the Royalmount pedestrian link over Decarie on this CBC piece and maybe it’s just the angle, but that thing…! Nobody could make Decarie even uglier? Hold my beer, says Carbonleo.
In addition, there’s concern that the walkway is not sufficient, and extra road space will be needed for all the millions of cars wanting to access the area.
What if they held a mall development and nobody came?
Blork
Carbonleo CEO Andrew Lufty said the pedestrian overpass is “transformative for Montreal, for our society, for our planet” so I guess it must be true and has no overblown hype at all, just like the rest of the project.
Kate
He also says “We’ll probably drive about 20 million visits or passengers through the sky bridge on an annual basis.” I like that verb. Definitely isn’t thinking of people as a herd of cattle or sheep!
Joey
That angle is useful to get a sense of the thing but not a viewpoint most of us will ever have. Not exactly Architectural Digest material, but it might not look so bad when the whole thing is built. Decarie is so ugly it’s almost glorious.
Blork
Yeah, it definitely looks like a walkway created by a junior IKEA designer who is used to working with Meccano sets. Definitely optimized for “cheap” not “beautiful.” But if it was more elegant (imagine a rounded swoop and less clunky attachment to the piers) then maybe it would stand out weirdly and draw attention to the ugliness around it. Lipstick on a pig!
Spi
There are construction compromises that have to be made, if you want to minimize the impact on decarie then you pretty much have to design something that can be craned into place and that means something that can be pre-built. It’s hard to build a prebuilt structure without making it look like it was well prebuilt.
Nicholas
We’re complaining about the aesthetics here? Decarie is a waste land and nothing short of blowing it up and restarting will change that (or maybe decking it over, but the service roads and car-oriented development would still be there). This is not going to happen, as much as I would like it. And since pedestrians will be inside it mostly, they won’t spend much time looking at it from the outside. This is like my friends saying the REM is ugly on the West Island, when the 40 and service roads and parking lots are right there! Sometimes cheaper is better. Hopefully we can spend our money making other places nicer.
Ian
Sure it’s ugly, but let’s be realistic – this is what it looked like before:
More egregious, I think, is the sci-fi utopia that artist’s rendering of the fully constructed mall compex. The only thing missing is some flying cars and white people in togas.
Uatu
Hope there’s security. Looks like a great place for the homeless to squat or pedestrians to get mugged.
JaneyB
According to the article, ‘younger people who represent the majority of luxury shoppers, will be coming by metro.’ Yes, if there’s two things I naturally connect, it’s youth and expensive shopping habits,…followed closely by public transit use for high-end shopping. Utter nonsense from these people. When does it end?
GC
Yeah, that raised my eyebrows, too. Regardless of the age bracket of luxury shoppers, surely most of them do not arrive by public transit?
The prediction that 2/3rds of shoppers will arrive by transit also elicited some side-eye. The article doesn’t mention how the developers arrived at this estimate, other than wishful thinking. I wonder if that’s even true of the underground malls downtown. I suspect it’s not even close to true for Dix30.
Ian
Bored teens taking a metro to Ardene is one thing, but wealthy bored late milennials luxury shopping via the loser cruiser? Good luck.
bob 18:34 on 2024-03-27 Permalink
Johnny Tightlips, where’d they hit you?
I ain’t sayin’ nothin’.
But what do I tell the doctor?
Tell him to suck a lemon.
Ian 08:12 on 2024-03-28 Permalink
I admit when I read “la victime aurait catégoriquement refusé de collaborer avec les policiers pour les aider” I didn’t imagine him having said anything nearly as polite as “suck a lemon”.