It’s estimated that there are roughly 5,000 tonnes of trash left on Montreal sidewalks after Moving Day.
And that’s in a time when nobody moves house on a whim. It must have been worse in the halcyon days when finding and paying for a new apartment was, if sometimes challenging, not a labour of Hercules.
Whether Montreal can or should have a rent register has become a hot potato between the two main mayoral candidates, Luc Rabouin and Soraya Ferrada Martinez.
I’m afraid this next election will be a “between Scylla and Charybdis” situation. Martinez is so comically rapacious that Rabouin will likely get in despite having no new ideas or any convincing solutions to existing problems.
I’m not convinced Projet is entirely played out in the Plateau yet. Ian, I’m not sure what would convince you that Rabouin is a competent borough mayor, but from someone outside the borough it appears he’s been doing an OK job. He certainly isn’t a loose cannon like Luc Ferrandez was.
I ask seriously, not sarcastically, what you’d like to see the borough admin doing that it isn’t?
The election campaign hasn’t really started yet so it’s hard to completely tell what kind of administration either candidate wants (and there’s always the possibility of someone else entering the race). Rabouin has started differentiating himself from Plante (buses over bikes for example) but I’m sure a lot of what he proposes will be business as usual since he’s from the same party that has been in power for the last eight years and what they’ve been doing seems to be a winning strategy so why fix what’s not broken?
Well, that and he’s already passing the buck on transit, and we can already see on Parc that bus lanes aren’t much of a solution, but are easy to achieve.
To answer your question, Kate, literally anything to curb gentrification, reduce homelessness, enforce AirBnb limits, and focus less on performative cosmetic stuff like bulbouts and more on quotidien things that will improve resident’s lives.
Like what? Well, like normalizing intersections, bringing back twice weekly garbage pickup, enforcing idling laws, and limiting big trucks on residential streets.nothing spends, all within reach, with immediate positive results. Idling tickets alone would pay for garbage pickup. AirBnb fines would pay for more inspectors. Fewer rats and AirBnbs would make neighbourhood life better. It might even bring down rents and reduce gentrification by limiting property speculation.
Anything but say “without money from the province our hands are tied”. It may be my protestant heritage, but I am far more interested in the works than the condition of their souls.
I don’t disagree with Ian, but just wanted to say that I really, really appreciate bulbouts and a lot of the other changes to public spaces and streetscapes that, in my opinion, are beginning to have a cumulative effect across the city.
I feel like we’ve had this argument a million times before but Ian always seems to want a mayor who promises things that are beyond the scope of what a municipal government can do. Pointing out quite accurately that there are certain things only Quebec can fix is not passing the buck, it’s being realistic and not making promises that can’t be delivered.
The Airbnb situation is a good example. Quebec wrote a massive loophole into the law that makes enforcement extraordinarily difficult, because the city now needs to prove not only that a place is being used for short-term rental but that it doesn’t fall within the primary residence exemption. That’s a lot of investigative work.
You also want the SPVM budget to be cut (which I agree with) but then you also want more police to enforce idling laws and trucks using residential streets (already prohibited in most cases)?
Ideally, the city would shave a few hundred million from the SPVM budget and sent it over to the STM to improve bus service, but even cutting police funding would be a drop in the bucket. (And imagine how the Quebecor media machine would react to a mayor who slashes the police budget. A good way to lose the election.) The STM has a long-term maintenance deficit of $6 billion. Its operating budget is more than twice as big as that of the SPVM. Bringing public transit up to where we need it to be is not something the city can do without Quebec.
I’m also not sure how you can deny that reserved lanes don’t make a difference, even if they aren’t a perfect solution. They improve reliability. Building more of them will mean fewer buses stuck in traffic. It’s exactly the kind of thing a mayor should be doing.
Finally, bulb-outs. Performative? They improve pedestrian safety — literally save lives — and their greenery reduces the urban heat island effect, is good for biodiversity and the new saillies drainantes help avoid flooding too. All of that and they beautify the city. They’re not just in gentrified neighbourhoods either, they’re popping up everywhere in town, in Projet and Ensemble boroughs alike. And they’re done when the city already has to dig up the street for underground work, so they’re not some frivolity.
Gentrifier wants to stop further gentrification.
Thanks for the laugh.
LOl, Plante promised the pink line and she was a hero, I suggest enforcing municipal laws on the books and I’m a dreamer.
Looks like I wouldn’t vote for deWolf either haha
While I voted for her and likely would again, I really didn’t like that Plante proposed the Pink Line without first getting some kind of buy-in from the province. I think it would be an excellent idea but I prefer when politicians make promises that they’re capable of delivering on.
Plante promises the pink line and she’s a visionary, I suggest enforcing existing laws and I’m delusional. I see.
Looks like I wouldn’t vote for deWolf either, haha
Plante was widely mocked for the pink line idea, even by Projet voters, precisely because everyone knew it needed higher government.
And another +1 for bulbouts, they are hardly performative.
As opposed to normalizing crosswalks?
I really like traffic calming measures, but the bulbouts are epensive and don’t improve accessibility – that they are essentially flowerbeds makes them impossible to remove snow from and limitsmobility impaired access. The people here saying they are always part of infrastructure improvements must be thinking of specific cases, becasue I know for a fact that all the ones on St Viateur were installed as sidewalk repairs, with no other infrastructure. Enforcing idling laws and making curb ramps instead of bulbout flowerbeds would go a lot further to improving pedestrian safety and wouldn’t cose more than planted bulbouts.
TBH I threw bulbouts out there as one example, but I find it perplexing that planters and street furniture on the taxpayer dime are considered more important than accessibility. Not that surprising from the “bikes first” crew not to think of mobility impaired residents of the neighbourhoods, but I imagined people here were more progressive and inclusive. Oh well.
Also @deWolf, Parc has dedicated bus lanes and it still takes 40 minutes to get from Van Horne to deMaisonneuve, assuming the bus is on (reduced) schedule – which it usually isn’t. You can add all the lanes you want but wiothout improving frequency it is meaningless. I suspect Rabouin knows this, but also knows painting bus lanes is even cheaper than bike lanes since everyone wants separated lanes now. It’s the same low-hanging fruit tactic that provides visibility, not any effective solutions.
Also worth noting, AirBnB laws have been on the Montreal books for ages, they are completely forbidden in most parts of the city. I can look them up myself at any time right on the app. I realize that there is a provincial level to this as well, but the city still controls zoning and related fines, as we see almost instantly when anyone tries to fix their residence without a permit.
Bulb-outs would be nice if they were flowerbeds, but every other patch of dirt is just a collection of weeds.
Your crusade against bulb-outs is really perplexing. All of them are accessible, as with every newly built crossing they have ramps and tactile paving for blind people. They improve visibility by preventing cars from parking illegally in the 5m zone and reducing the actual distance people have to cross. And of course they literally slow cars down by making it harder to turn and narrowing the roadway.
I don’t understand your argument about snow clearance. The sidewalks are still cleared whether there’s a bulb-out or not.
Crosswalks are great but they aren’t often respected because paint on the ground (and increasingly cluttered signage) is easy to ignore. For every person who deliberately cuts off a pedestrian at a crosswalk, there’s another who rolls through because they’re oblivious. Much harder to do at a bulb-out.
The St-Viateur bulb-outs were built in 2016 or 2017 so I’ll take your word that they were not done in conjunction with any other work. But city policies have changed since then and it’s now normally the case that bulb-outs are bundled with other projects. Not necessarily a full street rebuild but things like sewerage works. That was the case for the saillies drainantes at Casgrain and Dante that were built a couple of years ago.
I’m beginning to think you’re nostalgic for the days when St-Viateur had a 50 km/h speed limit, illegally parked cars blocking every corner and nowhere to safely cross except at the stop sign at Esplanade…?
As for the Park Avenue reserved lane, yeah, it’s terrible that it takes so long for the 80 to run its course. Now imagine what it would be like if there was no reserved lane and it had to sit in traffic along the entire route.
I don’t have to imagine. I have been taking the Parc bus for a long, long time. I even remember when it came every 7 minutes. That actually worked better than when they brought in reserved lanes, but whatever.
It’s interesting that you can only argue your points with what ifs and how abouts and just making up what I might hypothetically want, with some reductio ad absurdum just to keep it personal. What’s next, word definition arguments? Ad hominem? Lol.
The reserved lanes on Park have been there since 1992. It’s hard to separate them from high-frequency days of the 80. The bus worked better when it came every few minutes, and it worked especially well when it came every few minutes and the reserved lanes were operating.
Also, why do you seem to think I’m arguing against higher frequencies? It’s not either/or. We need both.
Anyway, I’ll leave the ad hominem to you, that’s your specialty. I’m just the voice of gentrification in Little Italy, remember? Keeping the working man down one bike ride at a time.
A national funeral will be held for Serge Fiori on July 15 at the Salle Wilfrid‑Pelletier.
Sad story about how the SPCA has to work fast to save abandoned pets around Moving Day.
Allison Hanes points out how Moving Day has become a horrible, stressful time as rents soar and housing becomes more scarce.
La Presse has a tale of a young couple who moved into a place only to realize how filthy and decrepit it was.
I’m surprised how few stories we hear of lawful tenants not able to legally move into new apartments because the previous tenants refuse to leave. The police won’t get involved on the spot as it’s a civil matter, and despite being out of lease, only a judgement from the TAL could lead to physical removal. Maybe they don’t want people getting the idea that this is an option instead of the stories of “I moved out and had nowhere to go”
TIL that I had nothing to worry about when I backed out of a lease the day before moving in back in 1995 because the apartment was in such bad shape on June 29. I had signed the lease about six weeks earlier on the promise from the landlord that the renovations they were doing would be complete by then. I got the keys about a week before moving in and was shocked that so little had been done. There was no running water, the old toilet was out in the hall and the new one was not installed yet. The bathtub was beat up and very dirty. All walls were in bad shape full of cracks and holes and looked like they hadn’t been painted since 1940. Broken doors on the cupboards in the kitchen. Floors were all busted up. And it was crawling with roaches. (I hadn’t noticed before but there was some kind of food depot next door that was dirty and likely very roachy, and they had spread.)
The landlord promised the work would be done in time and the place fumigated. On June 29 I went in and almost nothing had been done, and there were no signs of fumigation other than one bottle of diatomaceous earth powder sitting on a table.
So I phoned him and told him I was cancelling the lease and would not move in. I had no idea if I had such a right but I did it anyway. He was furious and yelled a lot but I never heard from him again. But I had one day to find an apartment, and since it was 1995 that was actually possible and I did it, although in a different neighbourhood.
The La Presse article confirms that I did indeed have the right to walk away.
steph, indeed I have seen no stories on that theme and was unaware it was happening.
Good for you, Blork, that you were able to cancel the lease with impunity and find a new apartment in a day! In fact I’d say it wasn’t you who cancelled it, but the landlord who broke his promise that the apartment would be ready by the agreed-upon date. The stress of finding a roof over one’s head is aggravated by the arrogance of scofflaw proprietors who exploit their advantage in a market of desperate buyers. So desperate, that they are reluctant to assert their rights as stated in the Le Devoir piece.
I recently remarked that I was happy to see housing of any kind constructed, even high-end and I believe the idea of an eventual trickle-down effect. But I concede that it’s a very slow way to reconcile the imbalance between supply and demand. What’s more, the situation Allison Hanes describes is horrendous. Beyond indifference, the housing market seems to punish people for the sin of not having enough money. Then the political class compounds the suffering by not adequately enforcing existing regulations designed to ensure the availability of units.
If the market can’t respond, then the public sector should step in: social housing as Kate has recommended. What other recourse is there? If Edmonton can make a dent in it’s housing crisis, why can’t Montreal do the same?
jeather 18:29 on 2025-07-02 Permalink
My block has huge piles of garbage and mattresses. And garbage day is Monday.
Ian 22:47 on 2025-07-04 Permalink
I saw garbage trucks out en masse, with a backup pickup truck and another garbage truck idling to take over if needed. It was a pretty solid operation and reminded me of snow clearing. Very efficient and coordinated, Kudos to the city.