Empty storefronts: city gropes for solutions
In response to La Presse’s weekend dossier on empty storefronts on our commercial streets, the head of the SDC organization and a Chamber of Commerce spokeswoman are interviewed here but neither presents any bright ideas. The city had already ruled out imposing an extra tax on commercial spaces held empty and SMF is seemingly not interested in changing that policy.
The article points out that Rimouski, Salaberry‑de‑Valleyfield, Ste‑Agathe‑des‑Monts and Pincourt have imposed such taxes, but come on. How big are their downtowns? Let’s look at what cities of comparable size and status are doing if they’re afflicted by a similar issue.
Ian 07:40 on 2026-07-21 Permalink
“We tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”
azrhey 09:43 on 2026-07-21 Permalink
No one better put me in charge of anything, because I would double property taxes ( residential & commercial ) after 12 months of vacancies , and double every 12 months after that.
Either that, or after , say 3 years of vacancy you forfeit ownership of the property and it becomes public, municipal property, that they can either use it or sell it for profit.
Chris 10:11 on 2026-07-21 Permalink
I’ve no time to read the 2 articles, but I opened them both and the word “Amazon” does not appear. At least among people I know, no one wants to shop in a physical store. What they want might not be in stock, might be expensive, etc. They’d rather just tap on their phone and wait a couple days for it to arrive on their doorstep. Taxing local businesses won’t fix that.
jonathan 11:07 on 2026-07-21 Permalink
also no mention of tbe change in household size, the conversion of plexes into single family homes and the loss of density as a result . especially in places like the plateau, rosemont and villeray.
Kate 11:11 on 2026-07-21 Permalink
Chris, that had crossed my mind, yes. I order trivial stuff all the time, rather than spend an entire afternoon trudging through stores looking for some specific doodad I want. (I had to do this recently – it’s too tedious to tell in detail, but I ordered a thing, and I was short several whizmos to hold it together, and all told I visited 3 hardware stores looking for the whizmos, and finally was sold some whizmos that were slightly the wrong size by a man who insisted they would be fine. [Voice‑over: “They were not fine.”])
On the other hand, it was nice to get out of the house, and hardware stores always have other things you didn’t know you needed till you go there and look around, and the people at the Azores hardware store are really nice. So all told, not wasted time, but if I’d been able to click on “Whizmos, 3/16″, packet of 12, $4.99” I would happily have done so.
azrhey, please run for office, I will vote for you.
Kevin 17:05 on 2026-07-21 Permalink
I shop locally (and usually physically) whenever I can, and only go online when there is no other option.
Shopping locally keeps your money here, it keeps expertise here, and it’s just good long-term policy unless you want to live in a hellhole.
There is no point shopping online and voluntarily contributing to your self-exploitation by adding to the wealth of shareholders living in a far-off land who couldn’t care less if you’re living in a neighbourhood with high crime and eyesores.
Mozai 18:50 on 2026-07-21 Permalink
My experience shopping online has been whizmos that were not fine, gewgaws that were not gewgaws, and foobars that don’t arrive at all. At least in the shops I can tell if it’s fine, if it is what it says it is, and if it’s actually there. What’s bugging me is how often the shop isn’t there, or the shelves are empty, or the staff are absent (physically or mentally), and these weren’t problems I had ten years ago. Saying “physical stores can’t afford to do the job they used to when online mail-order gets all the money” seems false when the online mail-order can’t do the job either.
Kate 19:12 on 2026-07-21 Permalink
Mozai, at least with hardware stores belonging to chains (and they mostly do) you can usually use their website to check whether they have something in stock. This has worked for me.
Kevin, I take your point, and I do shop for some things locally, but I plead not driving when it comes to ordering some things rather than trying to track them down by foot and public transit. I also feel that my time has some value.
Kevin 10:23 on 2026-07-22 Permalink
Kate
It’s certainly easier to shop online, and yes, fresh competition does mean local stores have to be smarter and work harder than the massive multinational conglomerates.
Politicians should be breaking up companies (why does something that originally sold books now sell every product under the sun, and maintain warehouses for other companies, and sell cloud computing, and and and?)
bob 15:42 on 2026-07-22 Permalink
Books were Amazon’s trial run that built the system. The idea was always bigger than just books.
Urban blight is well-studied and well-understood, like aging. And like aging, there is only so much you can do about it.
The economic and social conditions that begat the commercial artery surrounded by housing with large enterprises on the periphery no longer obtain. Even if you could keep rents low, the viability of local business remains low because of these deeper changes.
Delivery used to be a thing, then it wasn’t, and now it is again. In times of yore you could call up a store, and some kid on a bike would deliver your groceries. You did not get a whatzit at the store, because there was a repairman who came to your house to put a new tube in your radio, or belt in your vacuum cleaner. Companies had fleets of trucks delivering rotisserie chicken, bottles of milk, and coal. But that mostly went away, because of economic and social changes. And those changes then came for the stores where you got your tubes and belts and milk and chickens, and bankrupted them.
I think what it would take to preserve the model we seem to prefer, with small businesses supplying semi-urban neighbourhoods, is a fairly radical set of economic reforms that disfavour the retail behemoths that are driving the blight – i.e., strictly regulating commerce, taxing the rich, and distributing public wealth more equitably, based on fundamental changes to the radical individualism that has ruined everything right and good. Good luck with that.
Ian 17:02 on 2026-07-22 Permalink
It wasn’t that long ago that Amazon and eBay figured out a way to make money off the internet that wasn’t selling porn.
Diversification should come as no surprise, it is the standard Japanese model for large corporations – you are insulated from specific downturns, and become a household name. You can buy a Mitsubishi bulldozer, stereo, television, or motorcycle, it becomes a name you can rely on for everything you might want. Like Amazon.
Tim S. 08:32 on 2026-07-23 Permalink
I dream of a tax on goods ordered online that is expressly used to reducing property taxes for commercial storefronts.
I’m sure that will be abused somehow, but let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.