Petit à petit, le Swatow Nouveau fait son nid

29 comments

1. On se croise les doigts pour qu’ils ouvrent des restaurants et cafés avec la même variété qu’on trouve à Toronto ou Vancouver!

   Me too!!! I moved to montreal from Vancouver 5 years ago and I admit, I go to chinatown at least once a week. I feel so at home there! A new bakery just opened up, I am not sure the name, but it reminds me of home. L2 bubble tea is a great hang-out, and whenever I can get a few friends together, dim sum at ruby rouge is the best. The little depanneur on st-laurent called “uni” has quite a good collection of japanese candy (the best), and I stock up there often.

   One thing that is also nice about being in chinatown for me is the fact that it is the only neighbourhood in montreal where white people are not the majority. I don’t expect native montrealers to understand this, but coming from toronto or vancouver, the lack of cultural diversity in many neighbourhoods in montreal can be a little unsettling! I am not sure why I feel this way, but I feel much more at home where there is visual confirmation that not everyone is the same. Seeing all the different foods, faces, languages, it makes me feel normal and accepted.

2. Agreeing with most of what you’re saying, but you do need to check out most neighborhoods of Montréal before saying something like it’s the only neighborhood where white people are not in majority. ;)

   Just in terms of Chinese, some of my favourite restaurants are in fact in the area west of Concordia!

   Or just think of Côte-des-Neiges, Parc-Ext, Villeray!

3. I would disagree that Chinatown is the only neighbourhood in Montreal where “white people are not the majority”. Although Montreal may not be as culturally diverse as Toronto, there are many other neighbourhoods in the city where you will find lots of people who come from various different cultures and are of different races. Take a walk through neighbourhoods such as Côte-des-Neiges, Parc-Ex, Montréal-Nord, St-Michel, etc. and you’ll find that white people are very much in the minority.

4. Good points. Agreed that there is good chinese food west of concordia, and that grocery store there that has a great japanese / korean food on st-cat.

   I used to live in Cote-des-neiges and I am very familiar with Parc-Ex and Montreal-Nord, if not St-Michel. ( I will check that out someday ).

   Perhaps I feel this way because I live on the plateau, which has it’s charms, but multiculturalism is not one of them. ;-)

   One of the things that is interesting about montreal, is that there are different kinds of cultures from europe and africa, not just asian cultures as we have in vancouver. Perhaps that is more why I love chinatown so much. I did not realize how influenced by asian culture I was until I moved here and I met people who were not as influenced. I just took asian culture for granted. It is hard to explain unless you have visited vancouver ;-)

5. 20 million dollars?!

   what a rip-off. talk about arbitrary inflation. are they coating the building in gold leaf? sterling silver pipes and plumbing? totally ridiculous. that building could easily be built with 10mil. but hey, what’s a few million dollars between friends?

   it will be nice to see something in that space, though, i guess. it’s a shame we couldn’t fill the space with an aesthetically pleasing building rather than the stucco/cement pablum they’re planning to build. Vancouver indeed has some lovely Asian-inspired buildings, some of the loveliest ones in the entire lower mainland, made of organic materials like wood and stone, not cement and stucco.

   An ugly, over-priced building that is in no way representative of China Town. Just because it has a sloped gable/roof does not mean it is of Asian-inspired design, it just means some uninspired developers slapped on a roof that mimics and insults the genre.

   In any case..

6. I love this development. It’s going to bring so much more life to Chinatown. I can’t wait to see what opens up in there.

7. Actually, 20m to build a commercial building downtown is not that much at all. Secondly, the building will be quite handsome and well-suited for the neighborhood. I didn’t realize that b/c it’s Chinatown we have to build traditional Chinese architecture. The roof piece simply hints at the asian character of the area. Yes, it’s Chinatown, but it;s also Montreal, and specifically, the Main. In fact, it is reminiscent of a lot of manufacturing buildings that line the Main here and there.

8. It’s the Quartier Chinois, not the Quartier Exactement Comme La Reste De Montreal.

   I’m a retired accountant and I’m telling you, they’ve doubled the cost of the building in order to put half of it in their pockets, just like everyone else in Montreal seems to do.

   Cronyism is an epidemic in this city. If half the money flowing through this city actually went to the right places it wouldn’t be in the mess it’s right now. The city’s infrastructure is falling apart, the city’s water has fecal matter in it as well as toxins and no one seems to mind drinking it even though the city posted a warning in all the major newspapers asking residents not to drink the water because of health hazards (pregnant women are especially at risk of contracting diseases and/or toxins that may harm the fetus.. check out Journal de Montreal, they published something about this about 3 years ago), the city’s medical system is a joke, the smoking ban was poorly managed and now everyone’s clogging up entrance ways with their secondhand smoke, Mount Royal is poorly managed and every year more of the flora and fauna is damaged or disappearing, the very water the island is surrounded by is polluted.. I could go on and on. ALL of this could be prevented or at least managed more effectively if people would stop living their own pockets with municipal funds.

   This isn’t something Gerald Tremblay can handle himself, nor any other mayor, they do not have the political or financial clout to stop people from funneling cash inappropriately. He’s a mayor, not a criminologist.

   So, yes, 20 million is way too much for this project. And it’s an ugly building to boot. And that Asian-esque roof thing they have going on is an insult to architects and designers everywhere, and an insult to the Quartier Chinois. This is Montreal, a creative hub with an international reputation, and the best they can come up with is this cement monstronsity?

   Come on.

   Anyway. Just my opinion.

9. Also, for the benefit of our readers, I’ve discovered this BBS thread illustrating the evolution of the Swatow. It dates back from 2007! I didn’t know there were so many fans (or detractors) of what’s after all just a shopping mall and private development project! ;)

   http://www.mtlurb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=996

10. mtlurb.com has threads tracking every major construction project and real estate development in Montreal. It’s a great place to keep on top of what’s going on.

11. Any practical use of a terrain vague in Montreal has to be applauded. Honestly, the way people carry-on about space sometimes, you’d think this was Paris, Sydney or Hong-Kong.

12. re: “private development”. i guess it really depends on whether or not you consider land to be personal property. many people believe land cannot be owned because it belongs to everyone. westerners have a difficult time with this concept but, for example, most members of First Nations believe the earth belongs to itself. we are merely its inhabitants and we are supposed to be stewards of the environment. as such, it is immoral and unethical to lay claim to the earth or to a piece of land.

    so, with that in mind, there is no such thing as a “private” development. we all share the city. we are all affected by so-called “private” developments. heck, the airport is private property but a heck of a lot of people use it as public space. same goes for shopping centres and malls, etc.

    my gripe with the inflated cost of this building is that it’s ugly, has no green space, and if they’re going to waste 10 million dollars they may as well give a small fraction of that to the public (trees, benches, green roof, accessible courtyard, bike racks, anything even remotely positive) or towards a better building design.

13. Niomi’s comments are so hilariously self-parodying it boggles the mind.

    All things considered, though, I’m having a bit of trouble making the ends meet with my own rent, so maybe, like, I could just move into wherever you live since we all have equal claim to the land, right man? I mean, it’s not like the lease you have entitles you to “private” space, right? In the grand scheme of things, we’re all stewards of the space you call your apartment. Or so I read in my First Nations Studies 101 course pack?

    Irrelevantly, I think the only people qualified to make the judgment call of whether or not the development is worth $20 million are–what a concept!–the investors financing the project. Or maybe, just maybe, Niomi, you’re right: they intentionally defrauded themselves by arbitrarily inflating the construction costs of their own building! No one would ever suspect that!

14. @ Michael
    Don’t pretend you do not understand what Niomi is saying. If your neighbor craps in front of you, on his private loan, you will mind. There are rules on what you can and cannot build. And that building, even if is according to the rules, is ugly. You, me and tourists will pass it by dayly.

    second, how about not paying taxes for 10mil$? Would that push some to inflate the costs??? Don’t be naive!

15. I like Niomi’s pissed off anger and I think she says some very apt things.

    Perhaps our society cannot sustain a sense of “public land” in the true (aboriginal) sense of the word, but it’s good for us to remember that that concept is there and to realize how we’ve created something so diametrically opposed.

    As for only “the investors financing the project” having a say in the development of a building, that’s a load of crock. If that were the case you wouldn’t have zoning laws, let alone a sense of citizenship, of civic duty, or communal belonging.

    I think I’d rather live in Niomi’s city, Michael, than yours.

16. Please. There’s a big difference between overstating costs to get a larger tax exemption and vague, conspirative suggestions of cronyism. Why, again, would a PRIVATE consortium of investors be “living [sic] their own pockets with municipal funds.” What municipal funds? It’s their own money! It is COMPLETELY their guess as to whether or not the market will deliver a return on investment consummate with the $20 million dollar investment. They guess it will. That is their call.

    It’s up to the city to draw up the rules of the game: zoning, land usage, density factors, architectural criteria, etc. That was the city’s say.

    The public’s say came in determining who would draw up those rules. The public also had the option of attending the Ville-Marie borough council meeting where it conditionally approved the building, pending design changes. You all did, I’m sure?

    This development isn’t some fait accompli that came out of nowhere. The building’s been proposed since 2007. If you had an issue with the architecture, you had a chance to address it; if the building height bothers you, you could have petitioned against it. Now that it’s under construction– constructed by a private consortium, with private money, on private property, no less– the chance to muse on aboriginal concepts of land ownership, etc. has passed.

    Finally, Leila, I’m not sure where Niomi’s city is located, but my city is Montreal. Montreal, as I understand it, isn’t simply a pocket of triplexes and art galleries, though. It’s the center of a major metropolitan region, the motor of Quebec’s economy, and, most importantly, a city with a constantly changing landscape and identity. The vibrancy of the city is, for better or worse, often linked to it’s economic growth. Those living on St. Laurent shouldn’t be so quick to judge those working on René-Lévesque.

17. I just hope some good restaurants show up there. Montreal has a few good places, but overall it’s really terrible compared to Vancouver when it comes to chinese and Japanese food. There have been some improvements, though. I’m very happy with the new ramen restaurant on St. Laurent just below Rachel.

18. This is an incredibly ugly building.

19. If someone needs something that I “own” but do not need or use, yeah, I think it’s my moral and ethical responsibility to give it to that person if they are truly in need of it. Need. Not want. If someone requires something from me in order to survive, and I don’t need it? Yup, I am obliged to give it to that person.

    This is also a difficult concept many cultures have accepting too, not just the western one. And yes, it’s relevant because this notion, this moral stand and viewpoint, directly affects architecture and the way we design our cities.

    As for the extra $10 million, where does it go? Literally, right into each investors pocket. They send in fake in invoices for work that never gets done and supplies that never get bought, and/or supplies get bought but most are stolen by helpful employees and contractors who keep their mouths shut because everyone’s getting a piece of the pie, and so have to purchased several times over. Ten pieces of wood bought for every 2 actually used on the project.

    It takes, what, 16 municipal manhours to fill an average pothole in Montreal, for a pothole that should only take a couple of hours? I wonder why that happens.. the logic truly escapes me. If it takes two people two hours to fill a 2′ x 2′ pothole, then how many hours is that in total? Hmm.. let me think about it for a sec..

    Really. It doesn’t take much more than high school level math to think about the numbers thrown out at us in the news everyday and then compare it to an average salary, or to the poverty line. $30 trillion dollars. $20 million dollars. $100 billion dollars. Holy frack! that’s a lot of simoleans.

    I may not make any friends in saying this, but almost every company does this to some degree, taking a little more (or a hell of a lot more) than they actually need to pay expenses and make a reasonable profit, even. They don’t need to take so much. It’s truly .. kind of sociopathic when you think about what some people will do to others to make a buck.

    Now. Obviously Swatow is just one of a million possible examples but the argument is still valid because it applies to all developments and to the way our cities are built. Like I said, they could easily spare just one million of the money they’re pocketing and make this building much nicer, it really doesn’t take much. They haven’t put any effort into it at all. They haven’t given back to their community in any way. $5,000 in trees would go a long way, if companies actually charged what they’re supposed to for planting a dozen trees. Can you imagine how many trees $10,000,000 could buy?

    Let’s see: a couple million for a green roof (which raises the building’s value by $2 mil, a plus for investors). $5,000 for some benches. $5,000 for a dozen trees. $100,000 for a courtyard open to the sidewalk that will attract more customers anyway, so another profit-positive feature. That’s how much so far? $2,110,000. Still another $7,890,000 to go. With that kind of money I could buy an entire block of duplexes in the Plateau, or 4 mansions in Westmount. With $20 mil you could buy 10 mansions in Westmount. And this ugly Swatow building costs $20 mil? Yeah, right.

    Seriously. Make a list of things that you’d add to the project that would benefit the city and the people who use or interact with the building. Then make a quick estimate how much it’d cost. How much could $10 million really buy?

20. To clarify: the bank gives developers a loan for the project on the basis that it will pay itself off in 10 to 50 years, depending on the loan agreement. The investors take half of this loan to line their pockets because it’s a quick payoff. They don’t have to wait 10 to 50 years for the building to pay off, they get an automatic payoff once the bank gives them a loan.

    There are a number of different ways to get the same result. It’s creative accounting. Crooks know all sorts of interesting accounting tricks, you’d be surprised. They don’t get rich by being stupid, after all, now do they?

21. Niomi,

    What are you talking about?? You have absolutely no information as to the costs of the land, the costs of construction, or, most importantly, the terms of the loans. You pulled a figure of $10 million out of your ass, constructed an equally half-assed theory around it, and proceeded to ramble on about moral and ethical responsibility in the context of… I honestly have no idea! Nothing you are saying is the least bit coherent!

    Construction loans aren’t issued without some amount of principal, payments need to be made to service debt, and, most importantly, the cost of liquidity wasn’t even that cheap when the financing was arranged for this project. There is no way this business, nor any other business can absorb an arbitrary 100% increase in amortization payments over any period of time. Crooks may well know some interesting accounting tricks to pocket cash, but last I checked, neither defaulting on unnecessarily large loans, nor running one’s own business into the ground were among them.

    What frustrates me (and no doubt other lurkers on this site) is the completely anti-development that always seems to pop up here. A moribund private sector does none of us any good. We all want a healthy urban environment, but the idealism needs to be tempered with realism, pragmatism, and an openness to change.

    I for one think that any private investment in Chinatown, especially in a project with a sort of Chinese identity, is infinitely more preferable than seeing the money go to a similar project in Brossard. If Montreal’s Chinatown is going to be anything more than a tourist attraction, then the community’s businesses must be allowed to grow and thrive there.

22. “What frustrates me (and no doubt other lurkers on this site) is the completely anti-development that always seems to pop up here.”

    I couldn’t agree more Michael. Urban degeneration is a fascinating subject, and is indeed a very poetic phenomenon, which attracts a lot of interest to cities like Montreal. I also think the grittiness of some of Montreal’s urbanscape is strongly associated with Montreal’s ultragroovy alternative scene.

    However, urban degeneration (and anti-development rhetoric) does nobody any favours in the long run, socially or economically. Nor is our cultural milieu dependant on its existance.

23. Dude, unless you’ve actually worked in accounting, worked for pretty much all of the major banks in Canada, worked for several different developers, and worked on the books for several dozen different companies from several different industries, as well as working on contacts for several different government departments, in essence, have seen the way CEO’s and accountants and investors and banking officials line their pockets with clever accounting tricks, then please.. lay off. Have you ever heard of Enron? Of course you have, who hasn’t? How, exactly, did the execs at Enron steal billions from their employees and investors? Do you even know? It was PRECISELY what I described in my previous responses. They also overstated their yearly profits and expenses, claiming to have more equity than they actually had, which is all you need to get a loan from a bank. You can do literally pull numbers out of your ass, fake the paperwork, and so long as it looks professional and realistic and is a viable business plan, the bank will give you a loan. It’s a similar concept to paying off one credit card with another credit card and paying that one off with yet another credit card, etc, in order to avoid ever paying interest on credit cards. You can do the same thing with bank loans.

    Which also ties into the big Bank Bailout fiasco going on in the States right now. Which I won’t even get started on it’s so.. sociopathic. Downright psychotic. These bailouts are going to severely harm those in low-income brackets and so long as all the Directors and CEO’s and investors at the big banks and big companies get their money they don’t care who they hurt. I tell you, a human being must be mentally ill to actively hurt or kill others for profit, without conscience. We should be rounding up these CEO’s and putting them into mental hospitals because they are a direct danger to the public. AND THEY ARE.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html

    So, until you’ve actually worked within the big picture and are not merely standing on the sidelines looking in, or even worse, are one of these these type of business people yourself and so are defending your own business tactics.. then please, voice your opinion, sure, but don’t even begin to assume I’m talking out of my ass, as you so eloquently put it, I’ve seen what these people do first hand. Even worse: without my knowledge or consent I helped many of them do it, which is why I retired from accounting in the first place.

    As such, keep the ad hominem to yourself and stop attacking ME and start attacking the actual argument.

    Which is: unethical, greedy people are screwing with the economy, ruining our cities, and erecting monstronsities, and it’s an epidemic in Montreal specifically.

    I am definitely not anti-development. I am merely anti-crappy-development. I love this city and every single building or urban change concerns me. If I didn’t care about the city I wouldn’t care about this ugly, over-priced development either.

    Mr. Anderson: have you actually sat down and calculated how much it would cost to build this development?

    I have.

24. Enron is totally irrelevant! And off-shoring debt into special purpose entities and mark-to-market accounting are not “PRECISELY what [you] described in [your] previous post”– it’s totally unrelated! That’s to say nothing of the fact that banks wouldn’t touch Enron in the months leading to the crash of their stock price!

    Calling out your totally invalid comparisons and pretensions of being able to accurately evaluate the costs of a multi-million dollar development based on one computer rendering aren’t ad hominem attacks. That’s pointing out nonsense.

    So you’re not “anti-development”? Okay, then, what do you call a mixed-use project, with street-level commerce on TWO streets, that restores the urban fabric in a very de-structured area full of empty lots, and helps consolidate a Chinese presence in what is an increasingly small, tenuous ethnic neighborhood ?

    Right– you call it a fraud.

    …

    I have not sat down and calculated how much it would cost to build this development. I have no idea what the land value is. What was the cost of the loan? When were the terms of the loans determined? How much principal was put up? Construction materials? Environmental remediation for the soil? Permits? Labour costs? Design?

    Do you know any of this? Perhaps you could show us your figures?

    Or maybe the only one practicing creative accounting is you.

25. I’m not going to argue with someone who has little experience or knowledge in either economics or the real estate development industry.

    Instead of arguing with me please make a list of things you think would benefit the city of Montreal and their estimated costs.

    If you had $20,000,000 what would you spend it on to better the Ville?

    Try to put it into perspective. Our government is constantly throwing out these incredible numbers and we just keep paying our taxes and working our asses off like good little Canadians.

    300 million. 5 trillion. 80 billion.

    Where is all this money going?

    These crooks are going to keep taking our money, robbing us blind, ruining our cities and our livelihoods, until we actually understand what 1 million dollars is actually worth, until we start doing the math for ourselves. It’s basic grade 8 math, you don’t need to be a genius to figure it out you just need to CARE.

    Just last night I was in the metro, Place des Arts, and the ceiling was ripped out in places here and there, pipes exposed, work only half done. And I immediately thought of that 20 million dollars and said to myself, hmm, $400 is all they need in materials and a couple manhours to fix this hole in the ceiling. And yet, the cost of a monthly bus pass keeps going up while more leaking, bacteria-ridden, mold-covered holes keep popping up in metro stations everywhere. How is it that we keep giving the STM more money and the metro seems to be downgrading rather than improving?

    This is only one tiny example. My other gripe last night: Quebec gets more funding than any other province in Canada, and Montreal is the biggest city in Quebec.. and yet Montreal’s infrastructure and municipal work is subpar compared to Toronto and Vancouver. How is it that Quebec gets so much money and Montreal is lying fallow?

    It’s downright illogical. The information does not compute. The books are being cooked.

    **

    As for Enron: it was indeed fraudulent accounting that got them into their mess which is why the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was created:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act

26. Again, nothing you are saying is relevant to the topic at hand. You are side-stepping the issue entirely. Where do you get your numbers?

    For someone that claims to have extensive experience in both accounting and real-estate, you seem to have a pretty hard time wrapping your mind around the idea of private and public money. Obviously you have a chip on your shoulder, but try to appreciate the difference between the private and public sectors.

    I don’t even quite understand which point you’re trying to make. Is it, “The corporate oligarchs and complicit bourgeois are robbing us blind”; “Damn blue collar workers, always on break or on strike”; or “Let’s hold hands and sing”?

    I have to hand it to you: your incoherent rants manage to touch the various corners of the ideological spectrum all at once. Subtlety and pragmatism, unfortunately, haven’t been touched upon yet.

    I’m amazed at the sort of emotional, knee-jerk reactions unleashed by something as simple as an unremarkable private development.

    **

    As for Enron, no one is disputing that fraudulent accounting was at the heart of the cover-up. My point is that comparing their esoteric and complex methods of accounting and corporate structuring to “PRECISELY what [you] described in [your] previous responses”–(ie: “…similar concept to paying off one credit card with another credit card and paying that one off with yet another credit card, etc, in order to avoid ever paying interest on credit cards…”)– is laughably simplistic.

27. I thought the funniest incoherency was
    “I’m not going to argue with someone who has little experience or knowledge in either economics or the real estate development industry…”

    and then a few lines later

    “…It’s basic grade 8 math, you don’t need to be a genius to figure it out you just need to CARE.”

    The latter, I think, answers Michael’s first question in his latest post quite nicely.

28. While I do think we have to accept some level of development and that something going on in the vacant lot that we hope will become the Swatow plaza is better than nothing, I do believe Niomi makes a strong argument. Developers have been making a killing in North America in all sectors up until now and they do it by minimizing costs on materials, design and labour. They have to be forced to do anything socially responsible and have demonstrated time and again that they don’t care about the environment. I would not be surprised to discover that a lot of that $20 million price tag is wasted if an audit were to be done.

    That being said, I think this argument is excluding the middle. We need development, but we also need accountability and social and government guidance to ensure that the development benefits everyone in the community and not just the developer.

29. Dudes you all suck !!! This is good for tourism and for the Asian community . You are all talk shit about this as if your the one giving cash!!! I hope it fills up and does very well for our city you don’t like it then don’t go there, Looks ugly well go to the next block ( what you doing there to begin with ) so why didn’t you design a beautiful Asian building with a nice roof like anyone cares !!! When i go to Toronto i do go to Pacific Mall and always say we need this in MTL vendors that import stock , movies (yes copied and original . ) and all that yummy food and snacks. Well I do hope we get new restaurants with variety of foods . I do hope the area grows and the whole area needs a face lift . So if your going to be negative so keep it to yourself RIGHT , this topic is about a mall not water or streets or if you are getting some or not !