Monday’s municipal council meeting was the night when Griffintown’s future was finally decided. Despite recent pleas from experts to stop the project, a city councillor asking for a delay on the vote, and a demo/mock funeral which led around 200 people through Griffintown to city hall, the PPU which will allow Devimco to build their massive 1.3 billion dollar mixed-use development was approved.
The motion to approve the PPU was passed by all but three councillors (Marvin Rotrand and Warren Allmand from Tremblay’s Union Montréal party as well as Richard Bergeron from Projet Montréal) who all expressed concerns about the lack of time given to review the project details and to properly hold public consultations. Rotrand expressed particular concern about the city electing not to use the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM), a non partisan commission which was set up to allow public review just such a project. Furthermore, just last week many changes were made to Devimco’s plan in response to concerns brought up during public consultations (most of the changes are trivial and amount mostly to green-washing). Apparently the mayor saw no point in making time to review major changes made to the development plan.
The biggest issue with the approval of the PPU is the precedent it may set for future developments in Montreal. With this yes vote, it is now official that the city has the ability (and apparently the desire) to be co-opted by private developers, bypass its own public consultation process, and then approve a plan for a development project that hasn’t even been fully thought out yet.
Photo by Jack Ruttan
16 comments
It’s become a dictatorship! It’s a very sad time in Montreal right now. Forget the project for a minute and consider the process – it s totally corrupt, without the slightest hint of respect for anyone. Even worse, if we vote these bums out, their pockets have probably already been nicely lined.
Finally we can go on with our lives. I can’t wait to see this go up, it’s going to be a great neighborhood for Montreal.
If the city government is apparently willingly co-optable, then the citizenry shall have to make a point of not re-electing such “officials”, as they obviously appear to be operating in their own best interests, and not that of the city or currently taxpayers, who are obviously “not important enough”.
Kyudos to Councillors Rotrant, Allmand, and Bergeron for trying to slow it down.
I’m sure Devimco had announced at some point that the whole thing would fall by the wayside if it wasn’t approved by a certain date. True?
BruB, you can’t be serious. It’s one thing to expropriate land for the public good, it’s another thing entirely to throw people and businesses out on the street for private (read: transnational corporate) profit.
This could have been done differently and still been a win for all sides. Now it seems that everyone (except the developer) is going to lose: money, heritage, opportunity, community.
Our sources tell us that there as many as seven projects waiting to get the greenlight via PPU, and none of them will go via the OCPM. More expropriations without consultation is the way of the future.
If you live in a slightly run-down or low-rent part of town, consider your homes and businesses at risk.
I have to admit that I am a some-time supporter of Tremblay. He’s bitten the bullet on alot of things and has tackled the unsexy job of fixing our infrastructure. This, however, is inexcusable. It shows no forward thinking at all. Big box stores and 6000 parking lots? Is that what Montrealers want? Is that what our economy will be able to support in ten years? NO.
On another note, is it true that Montreal is rare for a city in North America in that it supports political parties on the municipal level? Party politics is, in my opinion, the death of progressive thinking. That might explain alot of what goes on behind the scenes and why this city seems to nurture megalomaniac after megalomaniac.
Sorry AJ, I’m serious, yes the whole process didn’t go in the best of ways, but consider it all done and finish with in 10-15 years, it may become a new plateau or a new Marché Atwater. More people know the history of the plateau because it became a “it” place, more people are aware of the Atwater market since new construction came around (I’m actually looking to buy there right now). Hopefully, when it’s all said and done, Griffintown will become the new “it” place and maybe, just maybe some of the critics will say “Maybe it was worth it” I reallly doubt it because critics are usually just that, critics. and rarely looks on the right side of things.
I will say to you though that you where really active in the debate and I greatly admire that part. You were not “just a critic” and you deserve a tip of the hat. But please, now that it’s almost done, try to look a the silver lining instead of just looking at what was done.
I forgot to say that both parties are completely shooting in the dark. The “nay”sayers are all talking about “buy outs”, “money in pockets” and expropriation without really knowing the story. The “Yay” side are talking about slums and shacks when most of them never really put their foot there.
I wish people would tell the facts about the project, hard facts with prrof and not hearsay evidences.
The death of the OCPM is what is truly disturbing. If a project like this can get shoved through the system despite the protests of prominent architecture professors, a “superstar” like Phyllis Lambert, newspaper columnists (and bloggers :P, a majority of local citizens, etc, there is no reason at all to believe there can be a good future in Montreal.
Jean Drapeau sold us, and the world, on the idea that the Olympic games would no more cost tax payers a cent than a man could have a baby (which prompted Aislin’s famous “‘ello! Morgentaler?” cartoon. It took 30 years to pay off and the main legacy is a stadium that never worked as designed.
It just does not bode well as the history here shows all too well. Could be a good time for Mario Dumont, though, for when he starts telling Quebecers that Montreal is sucking the province dry, he won’t be wrong.
Which would we rather have? A reasonably attractive pedestrian-friendly neighbourhood downtown, or some cheap car-oriented houses in the suburbs? Face it, we will end up with one or the other and this is clearly the better solution. The Griffintown proposal is really not that bad. I don’t understand why the NIMBYs are so upset about it.
The Griffintown “project” astonishes me because of the actions of the City of Montreal, not Devimco. Don’t get me wrong, I think the project is poorly conceived, even at this relatively early stage; Megablocks, “lifestyle” communities, and “activity centres” aren’t my favourite urban schemes, but we ought to ask ourselves some more fundamental questions about the project. Most importantly: Why is Griffintown such an urban desert?
There is one simple reason why Griffintown hasn’t attracted much of any investment for the past few decades: zoning.
The City of Montreal has zoned Griffintown industrial. Now let me ask you: What developer (or builder or John Doe) wants to buy up a lot and convert a Griffintown property into row housing, or a condo complex, or office/commercial space, (or all three,) when it means battling extraordinarily rigid and archaic zoning regulations? (Not to mention remediation costs.)
To everyone who thinks Devimco is doing some great evil to “Griffintown,” you might want to check with the City first. The City has neglected to act on Griffintown in three fundamental ways over the past couple of decades.
(1) It would be pathetically simple for Montreal to rezone the area to mixed use and let it develop organically.
(2) Because the area consists of several piecemeal brownfield sites, the City could very easily subsidise remediation costs to spur real estate development. In fact, it wouldn’t be hard to get the province and feds on board to help gather capital. From what I understand they do this kind of thing frequently.
(3) If the city is concerned about viewsheds from/to the mountain/waterfront, then it can use zoning for something actually beneficial: impose an FAR of 4, or 5, or 6, at gradients that preserve sightlines and foster walkable “main street” style axes.
Montrealers need to take a critical look at their local politicians. Time and time again they have not acted in the best interest of their taxpaying citizens. The failure to act on Griffintown is just one example.
Remember this the next time you criticise Devimco: they wouldn’t be in the picture–there would be no single Griffintown “project”–if the City had done with the neighbourhood what it ought to have done a long time ago.
I like Municipal political parties. They provide cover from being associated with the platforms of federal and national parties which, most often, have nothing to do with municipal issues.
Having parties makes policy differences more salient to voters than a list of names on a ballot with no context, I think.
Sucking the province dry, what??
B, the city did take action to reverse Drapeau’s zoning. The master plan drawn up a few years ago rezoned the entire area mixed-use commercial/residential. Before Devimco came along, the entire neighbourhood (not just the smaller area of the PPU) was open for organic redevelopment. Devimco came on the scene demanding changes to allow them to build at greater heights and to be able to close and widen streets (hence the need for the PPU). Now that the PPU has passed, organic redevelopment is impossible because one developer will have a monopoly over a large part of the area and are allowed to build a development that is even less people-friendly than what would have come about had it been slowly redeveloped piecemeal by different developers.
I think it’s just sad that anti-development people who I honestly think made a small, but vocal minority) get all the attention in critizing the griffintown project. This neighborhood has been an embarrasing eyesore to our city for too long. I don’t believe the project is perfect (but then again what is?) but the positives definetely outweigh the negatives here. If we pass on Devimco’s plan, we may not get another chance like this for a long time to make what has the potential to be a great neighborhood and possibly help stem the flight to the burbs.
It’s important to remember that no one has been saying that Griffintown should not be developed, and the people who have raised concerns about the project are simple not a bunch of “anti-development” people.In fact many of them could better be described as “pro-development”. This is simply not the right project, we could have design competitions for projects of this scale like other cities, and we are stuck with an administration that simply does what it wants to by cooking deals behind the scenes, and believe me, deals have been cooked.
I ve been saying all along that Tremblay showed his true colours over Parc avenue. The beauty of politics is that people will forget what an arsehole he was over that issue because it was properly resolved.
Neath, Chris Erb and you have really nailed it. Except for a very few people who like living in a brownfield, or “friche industrielle”, almost all the critics of the project I’ve heard and read wholeheartedly FAVOUR redevelopment of the Griffintown area – indeed it is far better to redevelop and densify on-island than promote or assent to suburban sprawl. The critics are not “anti-development” or “NIMBY”, they don’t like this ill-advised design that is utterly disrespectful of the long history of the district and the neighbourhoods surrounding it.
Indeed there should be design competitions – some of the critics have put forth ideas that were far more coherent in terms of the historical and architectural context. One of the most important aspects would be respect for the existing street grid and widths – that does not mean there can be NO wider streets or boulevards – especially if there is a tram – but the underpinnings of a district are part of its bones even in the face of great destruction (I have visited several successfully – and less-successfully – European cities rebuilt after the wholesale destruction of the Second World War.
It is still important to mobilise to ensure that the promised social measures are actually carried out (building parks, provision for schools, community centres and other amenities needed by residents – not just frigging “lifestyle centres” that are a synonym for shopping – co-operatives and public housing schemes and streets respecting the existing urban grid, are actually built, and refusing the construction of unneeded big-box stores so close to the businesses in the downtown core.
Maria, i think you summed it up.
Lifestyle is an organic process and a public response, not a scheme modeled after a shopping mall with fancy restaurants and a couple plants outside.