I rarely venture into the northern part of the island, and on a trip along Boul Henri Bourassa last week I was surprised to find an entire city block reduced to rubble. It took a few minutes to put two and two together and recognize the site of the Place L’Acadie redevelopment that I wrote about back in January. (I apologize for the lousy photo quality – I was snapping from a bus window.)
It looks like the project to replace some of the city’s worst slums with Le Corbusier-style apartment towers has recently reached the “razing” phase. (Upon closer examination, I learned that the public consultation process suggested a few improvements but concluded that the project should go through ASAP so that tenants who had been relocated out of unsanitary living conditions could return to the neighbourhood (PDF).)
Photo taken June 17th, 2009.
8 comments
Mega projects are the worst solution to low income housing. The best solution is to have a livable minimum wage, of course. Failing that kind of intelligence, many small units spread throughout the city is the best, for various reasons:
– three storey units, such as on the Plateau, have the most dense housing in Canada, and a highly liveable urban form
– concentrations of low-income earners commonly spiral downhill
– ‘mixed income’ neighbourhoods, such as St. Lawrence and the Regent Park redevelopment, still have much higher percentages of low-income earners than the national or city average
In St. Lawrence, there are many young middle class owners, and their very young children, but they move out before they send their children to school: which has one of the lowest academic performances in the city. The Regent Park redevelopment will follow this pattern. I have taught in schools which included low-income housing, at percentages closer to the national average; those students often did quite well. I’d suggest that they emulated their peers from more advantaged backgrounds.
The right way to achieve equitable and productive low-income housing is to force it into wealthy areas that do not already have a surfit of it. Such areas can more easily handle the small disruptions, and will provide peers to the low-income children to emulate and exceed.
While these tenants cannot wait for the perfect solution, we have seen what a disaster Le Corbusier-type housing estates have been in France and Britain. Not all public or social housing is of that type; the first “Habitations bon marché” were admirably designed and still in good shape, as were the pioneering housing schemes in Amsterdam and Vienna.
Chicago and St. Louis built numerous high-rise housing projects, only to tear them down later. Any sense of community is destroyed, and the buildings themselves become a mugger’s paradise, while drug gangs take possession of the stairwells.
Le Corbusier was an idiot. (For a critique, look for Blake’s 1978 book, “Form Follows Fiasco,” if you can find it.) How many times do Le Corbusier’s impractical notions have to be built before city planners realize that this is the worst type of housing for underprivileged clients?
High rise housing is probably cheap to build – question answered.
40 years ago, when we started to go to our country house up north via the Laurentides autoroute, I remember marvelling at the swimming pool with the waterfall right next to the Place l’Acadie appartments. At the time, this seemed to be the epitome of urban living.
The best way to handle low-income housing is to mix it with “richer” people. In St-Henri, for example, on Workman street east of Atwater, the north side is lined with HLMs, whilst the south-side is lined with single-family houses.
At the turn of the last century, Paris had an even more radical way of mixing-up people; the rich would live the ground level of the typical 5-6 story buildings, and as you went higher, you had poorer people sharing the same roof.
Concentrating the poor in huge complex has repeatedly proven to be an utter failure; remember Pruitt-Igoe, and closer to us, the recent riots in parisian suburbs.
Indeed, “the swiss in France” (as F.L. Wright called Corbu) was a total idiot, the epitome of self-centered intellectual that fails to notice the existing evolution and History of housing, and tried to impose a machine-to-live lifestyle that totally dehumanized those unfortunate to be parked in there.
We are lucky in Montréal to have a very livable city centre, surrounded by very nice neighbourhoods mostly unblighted by speculators, and to have avoided the typical fate of most U.S. cities with a totally rotted core surrounded by an ever-expanding doughnut of urban sprawl. Let’s not waste that luck by building more Pruitt-Igoes.
And yes, let’s mix more incomes by building low-income housing in all those rich suburbs who studiously avoided building their fair share of it, while straddling Montréal with that burden while fiscally insulating themselved with lower tax rates (the proverbial suburban free-lunch) to enable the rich to pay less than their fair share of taxes (if their home values are so high, it is thanks to the proximity of Montréal).
Typical of most people on this board. Look at the picture and pass judgement, don’t bother to read anything. Judge a book by its cover.
First of all, this is mid density, not high density. It is surrounded by similar sized developments and a highway.
Secondly, social housing makes up a small portion of this project. Out of 1300 units – 223 are dedicated to social housing (17%). THAT’S IT. Another 477 (37%)are dedicated to the cities Access Condo project which is based on the Option for Homes project in Toronto. Essentially to encourage first time home ownership for new families. A CPE (day-care) is included in this section. The balance 600 units are for an old age home. This means that the percentage of social housing in the project is actually less then the % of social housing relative to housing in Ahunstic Cartierville which has a ratio of about 23%.
Thirdly, they are increasing the green space of the existing area by 24% and putting up sound barriers to shield the neighbourhood from the highway.
So all of you (usual suspects) with your Corbusier/Regent Park/Habitation Jean-Mance are way out in the left field.
GDS,
So what was razed down wasn’t a Corbusier-style “tower in the park” complex? What was it then? (really asking… just curious).
-X
GDS, if that’s true, that’s far smarter than anything of the sort we get in Toronto. That’s no surprise though, all critical mass for progressive policies in Canada originate in French urban Canada.
On the other hand, my main point still stands. The children in this development would be better served if this were built in Outremont or Westmount, but I guess they can afford more convincing lawyers in their NIMBY world.
I do agree that the low income would be better off mixed in with the higher income population however this should be done very carefully. For example, in New York the areas that have section 8 residents severely hurt the areas value and drive out almost all middle class residents including many lower class residents and force more section 8 in. This dramatically increases crime rates and will bring neighborhoods strait into the ground. Many of the neighborhoods in NY boroughs have been affected like this and it is taking a very long time to come back. Brooklyn has successfully come back for the most part but it still has parts in which very low class residents group up and these are not places that I like to walk around in at night. (Believe me my father is a police officer in Jamaica Queens) Mixing classes is good but you cannot mix extremes.