King Marketing

So now that our faux-bombardiers have our attention, I’d like to know: what exactly do they want instead of condos? And more importantly, why?

Michael Moore has a great chapter in Dude, Where’s My Country? — a facetiously dreamed Socratic dialogue between himself and his future granddaughter, in an energy and resource-starved post-oil future. “People left the cities to live in suburbs because they didn’t want to live next to people that were different from them,” he patiently explains to the puzzled child and to We, the Readers.

Well, isn’t that what the anti-condo activists are saying? “We don’t want your kind next door?”

Postwar tract suburbs are commonly derided as “cookie-cutter,” “boring,” “soul-crushingly dull,” “whitebread,” etc ad infinitum. Well, doesn’t that sound like a description of life in a Modernist social housing project like Les Habitations Jeanne-Mance? (Substitute “no bread” if applicable.)

Suburbs and housing projects are both ghettoes: each a perverse mirror of the other, based on the unstated assumption that these two groups - people with and without money - cannot and should not live intermingled.

Look at Beaconsfield: somewhere around Walpole Avenue or Windermere Park, let’s say. A land of three-story ranch houses, mock-Tudor manors, and split-levels. It’s affluent, and you can guess that everyone is pretty much of the same educational level and professional cadre. There might be a wealthy barber in there somewhere, but mostly it’s professionals, business owners and executive types. In short, people next door are pretty much Just Like Us.

Closer look: there are no places of work, shops or services within walking distance, unless you want to take your life in your hands and cross the railway tracks and the highway to dart southwards into Beaconsfield village. There are no cafs or restaurants, unless you count the takeout Chinese place in the one-story mini-mall down by the service road.

There is precious little access to green space. There are few places for young people to go. There are no places, no monuments or boulevards, period - just endless avenues of other people’s houses, with the occasional postwar school/factory complex. You’d be hard-pressed even to find an actual stretch of sidewalk.

If you don’t drive, bus service is pretty sad. People must drive, isolated in their plastic bubbles from the environment, and from each other. House prices are high, but when there’s no more oil they won’t be worth much.

Compare with St-Henri: corner of Notre-Dame and St-Remi, let’s say. Several blocks of three-story red-brick and aging greystone flats. A few condo units are going in. But walk for several blocks and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a new apartment building that doesn’t have an “SHDM” plaque on it like some sort of scarlet letter.

This is the area of Montreal with the highest concentration of social housing other than Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. The SHDM flats are in OK, if depressing, shape, but the ones that aren’t city-owned are slowly falling to bits: some nearby buildings have roofs and walls that sag, with widening cracks between the bricks.

Literally all the ground-floor retail in the neighborhood is papered over, boarded up, gone away, save a brave little corner coffee bar and, of course, that hardy perennial, le depanneur. Elevated highways loom overhead. Railway lines run a little too close for comfort, after which Notre-Dame becomes strictly industrial. There are a few places of work nearby: garages mostly, along St-Patrick - but precious few shops and services.

Things get better as you move closer to Atwater, but that’s due to… you guessed it - gentrification.

So what’s the solution?

I think it’s perfectly possible for government and the private sector to work together, to create viable mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods instead of “warehousing the poor” in rows of SHDM flats, or projects like Les Habitations Jeanne-Mance, which depresses an entire area by unnatural selection, which conversely, encourages the flight of middle-class capital to the suburbs, creating an artificial, unsustainable “wealth bubble.”

People of small or moderate means should never be displaced, and planners must work hard to ensure that “Monklandization” doesn’t price people out of their own neighborhoods.

But gentrification done right is a good thing.

Maybe it’s the stigma of the “g” word. Well, let’s call it “smart growth” instead.

Ideally, there’s shouldn’t be any “hot neighborhoods” with “trendy shops” - every neighborhood should be a really great place to live and work, to own and to rent, to shop and enjoy a public social life, with space enough for everyone, of every ability.

The real issue is perhaps not urban-infill condos in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve — but rather, overcoming the objections of demerger-obsessed sub-burghers in order to create suburban infill: turning the West Island from conurbations of one-acre house farms into higher-density, but viable towns and cities.