In our current economic climate where even hundreds of billions of dollars don’t make problems go away, it has been increasingly difficult to secure financing for new building projects. With suspicion regarding the solubility of major financial institutions abounding, it seems that financial uncertainty has made it to Montreal. As reported in the Gazette, Devimco announced today that it would suspend the beginning of construction in Griffintown until June 2010 rather than the projected September 2009 start date. Assuming the project does begin according to its revised schedule (and isn’t affected by the decade-long recession that is increasingly being predicted) Griffintown will remain in a state of limbo for a little longer.
While options on properties necessary to proceed have almost all been bought up by the developer, perhaps this gives Montrealers an opportunity to rethink megaprojects of this type. Are there options for development that are less dependent on the uncertain winds of international finance? Is car-oriented retail and more luxury condos really the best way to ensure economic stability here in Montreal?
11 comments
Seriously the Griff doesn’t need no devimcrap.
See for your self the area is now becoming the new plateau. Give it 10 years and this area will be the sweetest place simply because people like you and I will have decided that the place is cool. Many young professionnals are buying there, the place is blooming. Who needs a premade hub when you can get the real thing.
Forgive my words, but fuck devimco and its trash plan.
The Devimco project undermines all the achievements of Montreal’s urban planning. This area is ideal for families and households willing to walk to work and to non-work destinations. Instead those families have no option but to escape to suburban sprawl. Not only is the highest population density achieved by areas like the plateau, with social diversity and no highrises, these areas are populated by households who, if they lived anywhere else, would make much greater demands on the city’s infrastructure. Griffintown is a terrible place to put this project. Put it in a place that needs those condos in order to achieve transit-supporting density.
In other news, the plans for the Canada Post site are now online at http://www.lesbassins.ca/. They’re also holding some openhouses in the CP building this week or you can read about it today in La Presse or at cyberpresse.ca.
Ugo, I assume you mean people buying up and renovating existing buildings?
It would probably take a little more security not to be faced with expulsion or demolition for there to be new building. I’m not particularly familiar with the area – I have explored it with friends from the Southwest, but that was a few years back. There does seem to be some need for infill housing and rehabilitation of industrial buildings, but probably smaller private investment programmes and investment in social housing would do a better job.
I would like to see this area “developed” as in repopulated, but it may be a silver lining that the real estate slump is providing some breathing room for a more intelligent approach to planning, indeed relying on Montréal’s enviable achievements as a liveable city.
Griffintown is a run-down and quite embarrassing area really. The area is the most natural place to expand downtown. Obviously these anti-progress whiners aren’t going to tolerate downtown coming closer to the mountain, so instead, downtown has nowhere to go but south.
Of course, the most historic buildings will be protected (Henderson-Barwick for instance), but the run-down crap (seedy bar on the corner of Mountain and Wellington) will be demolished.
And building new buildings here won’t make it a suburban area. Provided we build in… you guessed it DENSITY.
Well said Mr. Robertson, those whiners should be ignored. If the city lets the place to fill “organically”, it’ll take maybe, 50 years at the rate things have been going in the last 50 years.
50 years of lost tax revenues for the city, how are the supposed to pay for all those plateau toys? Biking lanes, tramway, flower pots slowing traffic and the salaries for all those committees to hear all those whiners?
I haven’t read anyone on this board who is anti-progress or anti-development per se, but after some of the horrors (military and civil) that have been committed here and worldwide in the name of progress, it must be kept in mind that there is such a thing as “destructive progress”. Something that would make historic areas of Montréal resemble some soulless plot in the wilderness of middle America would be one example. Some of the developments in certain (not all) high-density postwar suburbs in Europe (such as the horrific Le Corbusier “barres”) would be another. Interventions must be done with delicacy and tact; this is not a question of opposing development or progress, but drawing upon layers of existing history.
Critics are not “whiners”.
I have no idea whether the seedy bar at the corner of de la Montagne and Wellington is an interesting building; closer by, there have been a great many seedy bars in the Plateau and adjoining areas – and, I believe, in St-Henri and other southwestern areas – that are now most desireable and even trendy locales. It is very important to conserve humble buildings if they can be rehabilitated, not just great monuments.
Very important to keep existing street patterns. No wider streets to encourage oversised cars (I’ve seen lovely small street and leaf-cleaning trucks going by my window as I work; they seem to be German imports). A dense street grid is an important means of ensuring population density.
I do think neighbourhoods can build taller than the typical Montréal triplexes, though they should be kept in mind as the architectural vernacular here. But there are problems with very tall buildings in terms of rising energy costs. With a building of seven storeys or so, a healthy adult can easily get some exercise by going up and down the stairs if he or she isn’t carrying a heavy load; with a much taller building, everyone has to always take the lifts.
I don’t understand why the Plateau is used as an example of a very livable place. I used to live there a couple of times and I never liked it. Indeed its architecture is cool, it is as safe as almost any other neighborhood in Montreal, but most of its streets are full of people who could not care less about their neighborhood. There are broken bottles everywhere, people smoking and cigarette butts on every single square meter of sidewalk. I know some streets are exceptions. Mont Royal street is relatively clean, those that meet square St Louis are pretty clean too, but I’d say that most of it is not really livable. All the ugly tagging makes commercial streets look like garbage. I wonder if taggers want the whole place to be just residential, as they seem to really hate mixed residential/commercial buildings. I find the Plateau completely controlled by taggers and litterers, it’s actually in a pretty sad state considering its amazing architecture. I wonder why nobody else seems to notice those things. Please explain.
Bicycle paths, tramways and traffic calming devices are not toys. They are the fundamentals of a sustainable civilisation.
Fuck off, Malek. Hope your car exhaust gasses you soon.
And I do not live on the Plateau.
Yes Maria, thank you for your fair remarks.
Insulting people when you have nothing more to add.
My car exhaust will most probably harm you first before it harms me ;)
Enjoy the fumes.
Your language is very kind. Do you really think your opinion matters when you have such a language.
Show your common sense/education & we will listen.