> Don’t get me wrong, I think highrise condos and single family detached homes have their place. Lots of people want a large home with a lawn. But more than anything people want an affordable place to live, close to their work, their family, friends, etc. There's a reason the realtor's motto is location, location, location. It would be nice if detached homes and condo towers weren’t essentially the only two housing options in most of North America. It would be nice if more people could live where they want to live. I imagine that if people were given the option to live in the kinds of communities that I found in Montreal, many – not all, of course! – would.
I have also been watching videos on YouTube by a channel called "Oh The Urbanity!" which is about urban design and how cities can be made more walkable, bikeable, and all around easier and safer to get around in. They often highlight Montreal in their videos, and it's made me want to visit for a week just to experience what it would be like living in such a city. [1] is a video that had some particularly strong arguments that I enjoyed.
I live in Montreal. One thing that is remarkable here is that even with 2M people, there are no ghettoes. Rich neighborhoods are generally mixed in with poorer ones. It's a great city to live in and to raise a family.
HM is steadily gentrifying though. Montreal North has a pretty shit reputation. I remember there were riots there a few years ago and one of the journalists who was sent to cover it was relieved of his camera by some local residents. He wasn't even an outsider, its the neighbourhood they grew up in.
crime is on the rise, there's shootings and stabbing every week ... some neighbourhood are not save during night time. I'm not sure we're talking about the same Montreal here
Not really no, there's been a bump which studies seem to agree is an aftereffect of COVID, but the media is also paying more attention to it. There's always been some amount of shootings and stabbings in Montreal, and 99% of Montreal is safe during night time.
euh thanks for proving my point lol have you read the report ?
"À Montréal, en 2021, ceux-ci ont augmenté de 17,3 % par rapport à la moyenne
de 2016 à 2020. Les homicides et les tentatives de meurtre ont augmenté de façon importante et la problématique
de la violence armée contribue très certainement à ce portrait. En effet, la moitié des homicides et des tentatives
de meurtre commis sur le territoire du SPVM en 2021 impliquait la présence ou l’utilisation d’une arme à feu
(voir tableau Armes à feu). La problématique de la violence armée demeure au centre des préoccupations du SPVM. "
I don't think the US is the example to follow here ... you want mass shootings every week? this is like saying well you can put your hand in boiling water after all it's not as hot as the sun lol
As a Chicagoan, I don't understand this critique of North America. This seems to be a critique of the suburbs.
> They are dominated by detached homes, often set back from the road by lawns. Multi-family housing is generally confined to the downtown, and mainly comes in the form of high-rise towers.
This certainly doesn't describe Chicago at all, or even nearby suburbs. It seems like a third of the makeup of Chicago neighborhoods are three-floor walkups and courtyard buildings, right next to single-family housing. The high-rises are where upper-middle class people from out of town move to (and overpay for) because they've been filled with mythical tales of superpredators.
Chicago and NYC are probably the two places this critique does not apply to. Take Houston, LA, etc. that are all around the same size, and you'll find a significantly different makeup of housing stock.
Take where I live - Seattle - and the criticism makes a lot more sense. I live in a neighborhood about two blocks from a light rail stop and still walk by single family homes on relatively large plots on my walk from door to door. In nearly any direction, you are within a block or two of what one would say looks like a suburban single family home. There is the concept of "urban villages" which are small pockets of multi-family housing surrounded by low density housing.
I have a strong conviction that the reason Montreal housing is cheaper is in no small part because of the language barrier. Even if you could work remotely, why would you move somewhere you don't speak the primary language, surrounded by people that are somewhat hostile? It's a much smaller market.
Most countries have language skills requirements for immigrants though, and language isn't an intrinsic part of a person but can be learned, so language skills requirements certainly aren't racist.
Canada is so heavily reliant on immigration that what's classified as barely passing English is enough to move to the suburbs of Vancouver and Toronto. There would be so much backlash in Vancouver if a bill like Quebec's Bill 96 passed to prevent first generation Hindi or Mandarin speakers from communicating to their doctors in anything but English. Quebec's actions are racist. They literally try to exit Canada with every federal election
Health services are not really affected by loi 96 and mandarin speakers have no issue talking to their doctors in my experience (specifically living with a mandarin speaker in Montreal in the past, with whom I'm still in contact).
However, doctors now have to be able to communicate in French and English along with any other language they wish.
Independence sentiment in a province annexed through war, even if it was long ago, and that has kept a different identity, has very little too do with racism it seems to me.
As someone who lived in Canada but isn't Canadian, there is so much disinformation regarding Québec in the rest of Canada, and not uncommonly outright hate, that the often heard claims of racism are very ironic.
> I live in a neighborhood about two blocks from a light rail stop and still walk by single family homes on relatively large plots on my walk from door to door. In nearly any direction, you are within a block or two of what one would say looks like a suburban single family home.
I live in Chicago, in a three floor walkup three blocks from an El station, and walk by dozens of single family homes on the way there. There are single-family homes everywhere, it's very difficult not to be within 100 feet of one.
Are single-family homes the enemy? I think they're nice.
-----
edit: Houston and LA are notably strange places. I'd add Nashville into that, which turns into what seems like Russian doll-nested suburbs right after you leave downtown.
Houston is what gets held up by house-building anti-zoning advocates as a model, though, for some reason. To me, it's always been a hellhole, but I haven't visited for years.
Also doesn't apply to Boston, Philly, and perhaps some smaller cities in New Jersey etc..
The author is Canadian and it seems like he's taking a lot of his perspective from Toronto, which is actually kind of bizarre in that it has clusters of high rises with single family homes in between, and leafy suburban neighborhoods right around downtown.
Toronto’s core urban density is lower than Montreal’s. Am referring to the densest neighbourhoods like Plateau. Often I go to Toronto and find I am the only one walking down many streets, which does not happen often in Montreal or NYC
It's entirely unreasonable to expect cities to look like some perfect gradient of density like something out of Cities Skylines; you'd expect the central desirable areas to be the most dense, and pockets of density here and there, but you'd still find single family homes even in dense areas for quite awhile. Paris didn't become as dense as it is overnight, and even there you can find relatively low-density housing quite close to the CBD.
The question I'd have is how close is a non single-family dwelling (exclude duplexes, too) - I'm in a relatively low density ruralish town, and there's an apartment building a block away on one side, and three on another.
City planning hipster-ism is great clickbait on the internet. Younger people without much experience or brains click on it and get all enthusiastic about the idea of some mythical perfect city.
In this case, the "missing middle" is what cheaper living looks like outside of a big city center. In the big cities, high rises are used because the city is literally out of space. Outside of a big city, single family homes are more popular because people almost unanimously want to live in them. But those who can't afford to live in a single family home, but live outside of a large city--those people live in places that look exactly like all the "missing middle" pictures in the article. Nothing in there looked unusual to me. I used to live in places like those. Now I don't, because I upgraded to a single family home.
Maybe the young ones have seen better. I grew up in an apartment building, it was great. Basically the same as a house, but there were other kids my age living there too and we all could easily visit each other's houses and played sports together every evening.
Most of Asia, single family homes are just huge apartments with good soundproofing. There's literally no reason they have to be detached homes all you have to do is build bigger apartments.
There's so many benefits - shared spaces are better because a lot of families contribute, easier access to the city for parents and kids, potentially eliminates the need for a car as well.
Perhaps we can engage with the material without insulting the people behind it. It’s not exactly a compelling argument.
I find it a little odd that the assumption is that single family homes are somehow always superior. That is not the case in a lot of the world. It’s not true in New York. It’s certainly not true in most cities outside the US and Canada. Perhaps instead of assuming everybody fits into this world view, we can accommodate other perspectives?
As for why single family housing is looked upon negatively, it’s simply inefficient. It’s inefficient for heating,for transportation, for land usage. It lends itself to cars more than public transportation, which, no matter how many teslas are sold, is a net negative. In my experience in the US, it also leads to enclaves, the so called gated community. I’m not certain if that’s just due to a history of racist housing policies or just a feature of suburbia but it’s worth noting.
That said I don’t think we’re in danger of eliminated single family housing anytime soon. Indeed the thing about single family housing is that it’s the easiest form of housing. Someone buys land and builds a house. It’s not so easy to make an apartment building.
> I find it a little odd that the assumption is that single family homes are somehow always superior.
“Superior” is a value judgement. I think “preferred” is closer to the mark. People like single-family homes and they go to great lengths to buy them and deal with the externalities of living in them (commuting, maintenance). As the externalities lessened (broader acceptance of working remotely), SFH became more valuable in the last two years.
> It’s not true in New York.
There are great swathes of lower-density housing in New York and its surrounding region. NYC is an outlier on account of its geography and place in the economy.
> Perhaps we can engage with the material without insulting the people behind it. It’s not exactly a compelling argument.
I think it was an appropriate way to engage with an article that takes “people would rather live in mixed-density neighborhoods than single family homes” as its premise. The revealed preference of the entire post-WW2 era in North America is mostly the opposite of this assertion. In general, as society has gotten richer more people have looked to own single family homes.
> The revealed preference of the entire post-WW2 era in North America is mostly the opposite of this assertion.
But with the rise of climate change, ever-growing traffic and commute, urban sprawl, and expensive housing, things are starting to shift in the other way. This narrative does not exist in the vacuum, it's been over a decade of Strong Towns, walkability, more bike lanes, millennials not owning cars, and other assorted trends pushing against the postwar status.
> as society has gotten richer more people have looked to own single family homes.
And society's purchasing power has not exactly risen in line with housing costs, especially since 2008.
The problem we have in the United States is we have a lot of growing cities, like in the sun belt were I am, it is illegal to build "missing middle" housing in a lot of places.
You can argue against someone's opinion, but you shouldn't degrade their intellect to make your point.
There's a growing demand for mid-density mixed-use land because younger generations cannot afford SFHs, more incline to take public transportation, more things to do, pub/bars/live music than SFH with backyards that caters more to families with kids.
Urban sprawl happened for many decades because of cheap and abundance of land, less population so gridlocks are not as big of a deal. But now it's very hard to change the zoning or land-use to increase the density because of NIMBYs, even for suburbs that are within miles from downtown core.
So yeah, try to understand instead of just attacking them as "without brains".
> There's a growing demand for mid-density mixed-use land because younger generations cannot afford SFHs, more incline to take public transportation, more things to do, pub/bars/live music than SFH with backyards that caters more to families with kids.
These are only unmet demands limited to a few cities that young wealthy educated surburbanites flocked to as a group, thereby making them very expensive. Instead of detailing my unremarkable life, apartment, and neighborhood in Chicago. I'll just say that not everybody has to live in SF, Seattle, Austin, or whatever the next desirable place is. If you can't afford it, there are other places available. It isn't like there aren't tech jobs in Chicago, or remote.
> I'll just say that not everybody has to live in SF, Seattle, Austin, or whatever the next desirable place is.
That's easy to say, but prior to the pandemic and the sudden shift to WFH, the trend was flying in the face of this droll advice. Tech hubs are consolidating. But since then, we've seen transplants buy up housing in other markets and simply spread the same issues of traffic and housing prices there too, as we've seen in markets like Phoenix, Boise, Salt Lake City, (though admittedly some of these are starting to fall). Take people out of Austin and they just end up flooding Nashville, or Raleigh, or Charlotte. New Yorkers are resettling in Philadelphia. Peter Thiel says Florida real estate prices are comparable to California now. And so on.
My issue with the StrongTowns set is they only want homes built for the use-case thirty-one year-old single office workers. They can't imagine anything else and they are quick to denigrate people who want a yard and a driveway as knuckle-dragging apes being duped by oil companies and SUV manufacturers.
Closely related are the people who ask over and over again why everyone in the US can't ride bikes like they do in Belgium. I'll tell you why - my backyard is bigger than Belgium. But don't worry, once the typical HN reader hits 65 you will see a sharp decline in the suggestions that everyone ride bikes everywhere.
Some of us want: a yard. A garage. Space between us and a neighbor. Enough room for a family of four.
I absolutely don't see the StrongTowns model as an unassailable good - I have no desire to share a wall with my neighbors.
I think you are misunderstanding "missing middle" in a potentially important way, or at least advocates would say that you are - you cast these "missing middle" housing options as a cheaper, inferior option to suburban detached homes. They would argue that that zoning/subsidies/etc. upset that balance and if the field was leveled (e.g. remove zoning blocks from middle density housing, remove subsidies from suburbs) then some?/many?/most? families would choose the more urban, higher density over the SFH in the suburbs.
I'm not sure they are right, but your characterization isn't what they mean.
> Outside of a big city, single family homes are more popular because people almost unanimously want to live in them.
This desire isn't, like, innate to the human condition, though. It's the outcome of a long history of social, cultural, and economic policy. What people want is generally nurture, not nature.
>City planning hipster-ism is great clickbait on the internet. Younger people without much experience or brains click on it and get all enthusiastic about the idea of some mythical perfect city.
Single Family Homerism is very popular among boomers who have never been to Europe or Asia.
Sure, but even U.S. city centers are way lower density than the European or Asian equivalent, often looking more like what would be a suburb there. Truly walkable areas are basically non-existent.
> Truly walkable areas are basically non-existent.
It's weird that I've made it nearly a half-century without owning a car. Edit: Sarcasm aside, I think you're critiquing a abstraction conjured by political rhetoric. I've walked every street of Chicago. In Chicago, every four blocks in every direction is a commercial street.
What I think you find if you dig into it, is that they can't find the balance of trade-offs they want. I can find a completely walkable city near me, where I could walk to everything I could possibly want, and at reasonable prices ... but crime is too high for some people.
They want the low-crime high value suburban life in a dense environment, and that's what they often can't find. It can be really hard to get this out of them, you basically have to keep providing examples of what they say they want until they finally break down and admit why they don't work.
It does describe an awful lot of US cities though. I don't think the article was claiming that Montreal is the only place in north america that looks like this, was it?
> It does describe an awful lot of US cities though.
I think it describes the suburbs that a lot of these people are from. I don't think it characterizes North American cities, which this article definitely thinks it does. I was struggling to find anything distinct between Montreal and Chicago from all of these pictures. And I've lived in a lot of different large, small, and medium-sized US cities in my twisty journey from Chicago to Chicago, although my only coastal cities are Portland, OR and Baltimore.
I think the Toronto distribution (which I'm willing to assume is accurately described) is probably characteristic of a particular very rapid growth pattern with a particular income distribution, rather than some North American collective mistake.
The funny thing is it doesn't really describe Toronto, for me, based on some exposure.
It does match my experience in several large and medium size US cities though. Of the biggest, NYC and Chicago no, LA and Houston yes. DFW, Atlanta, SF (sort of), DFW, Phoenix, etc.
I've seen far, far more terrible suburb patterns than good ones I guess, which does seem to be the collective NA mistake, from a city planning/growth point of view. Definite skew to the west, especially cities that didn't really grow until after cars were plentiful. My guess is this is mostly why NYC and Chicago are different than LA and Houston in that respect.
As a former Chicagoan, 100% agree. I do wish the city and state were better governed, as someone who grew up in West Central Illinois and served as a politician there, it’s not called Forgottonia for no reason. There are other parts of the state with some reasonable density and living spaces and could be so much more with even a bit of additional investment.
In Illinois, we choose to exclusively elect corrupt self-dealing politicians. We think that a politician without an obvious ulterior financial motive is mysterious and therefore dangerous.
I like Montreal and Toronto. I live in Toronto because I like the diversity, but I'm sure I would happily live in Montreal too.
That said, it isn't fair to compare housing costs between Quebec cities and Ontario ones. Land tax is much, much higher in Quebec to the point where even just across the river from Ottawa you'll see 2x housing differentials. Add in language laws of Quebec which, I'm actually in favour of, and you'll end up with parents preferring Ontario even when they have a choice of where to live for work.
Lastly, the scale on those maps matter. Montreal is much smaller than Toronto. My home city has a bunch of condo buildings, yes, but they aren't all surrounded directly by suburban homes. There are a decent number of midrises and row houses, though not as much as I would hope for. But when looking at maps, it's important to keep in mind the absolute SCALE of Toronto. Toronto is HUGE. Only two American cities beat it out in size, New York and LA. Montreal has more midrises around its core in large part because its core is so small and that is the natural function of the mathematics of things. In Toronto we build our core up, up, up. Over twenty-five buildings are over 200 meters tall, compared to Montreal's measly two.
We can learn from some of the things Montreal does right, and I agree their midrises are generally speaking better than ours, but it's more complicated than this article makes it out to be, even if there are real lessons to glean from its good faith take.
The scale on the maps I showed is the same, which is the point. Toronto, as you point out, has a built up core, but Montreal spreads its density wider.
Corrupt and slowly dying city without any strong industry to keep it grounded including some pretty intense language laws. I think Montreal was amazing in the 60s and has been slowly dying since.
For Americans: the description above summarizes most of the prejudices Canadians feel about Montreal. Like most prejudices they might start from a grain of truth but take it too far.
Montreal has lots of corruption[1]. Most of it is related to public construction and activities of traditional organized crime (Mafia and Camorra). But these are "lots" by the civilized Canadian standards, Montreal is still better than the overwhelming majority of the world. Besides, when it comes to Mafia/Camorra activities, Toronto is not much better. Also, when it comes to government relations with party donors, I think Alberta just does a better work of hiding corruption, it is rotten all the same.
"Without strong industry" means that Montreal lost its manufacturing sector to China and Mexico, like so many North American cities. However I'd argue that the city has managed to develop a good technology sector (particularly in software) and an active cultural industry.
"Including some pretty intense language laws" is probably the most correct sentence above. The language laws in Quebec are, IMO, very stupid. But, because Montreal is the place with most Anglophones in Quebec, the city is were the anachronism of these laws becomes more obvious.
It's not slowly dying in any way and has a really strong technology sector. The corruption stuff... I've lived in Montreal all my life and have never seen or heard of anyone confronted to that in any way; I think there were some issues in the construction industry, but like it's a million times overblown
Same people,under order of British gov, also went down south and burned the white house in 1812. True story.
Not the point at all.
Montréal is unique. It's the only American city with both french and english cultures living hand in hand. It's also great for novel cuisine, micro. It has 4 full seasons do you can practice almost any sports and neat mountain ranges with amazing wildlife just an hour away to the north.
Brits ultimately lost that one due to a hurricane anyway.
I’ve enjoyed many months in Quebec (I went to Med School in Vermont and went up there many times) but I never got Montreal. Totally acknowledge I might have just not have spent enough time in the right areas.
Burning of Washington was done in retaliation of the Americans burning and looting York, the capital of Upper Canada. French Canadians, the Canadiens, lived in Lower Canada, whose capital was Quebec City. Probably not the same people.
I've been to Montreal a few times and live in Vancouver.
The missing middle of housing is what Vancouver could take from Montreal as the article states. The other thing it could take is the events (F1, ComedyFest, JazzFest, etc)
Skytrain, buses, and YVR are much better compared to Montreal.
It's a tossup as to which city is more corrupt with government-granted oligopolies and rent-seeking.
Born and raised here 40+ years ... The language laws are ridiculous and getting worse, the roads are horrible and getting worse, traffic is horrible and getting worse, salaries are not on par with the rest of Canada and our winters would be considered apocalyptic to anyone not used to it. If you're listening North America, nothing to see here move along. I would move in a heartbeat if my family roots weren't here.
You can do a lot of reading on the subject. One thing you'll find repeated is the FLQ crisis' effect on housing. Around that time a large movement of anglophones resulted in a huge drop in housing demand in Montréal. The city continued building at a reasonable pace but all those old apartment buildings/low-rises/row houses are kept maintained and thus haven't dropped out of the housing stock. The unfilled housing ratio is higher in Montréal as a result. That is simple economics.
Although I agree with the spirit of the post, the critique of what 'feels' nice and livable is highly debatable, and I believe intensely culture-specific.
I was born and grew up in a very dense, urban city in Europe, and I love big, dense cities. They feel fun and lively, while suburbs feel empty and eerie. On the other hand my wife grew up in the countryside, so for her suburbs are quite and peaceful while cities are dirty and noisy.
Also one can cherry pick beautiful/horrible examples of any kind to make their point.
something the author doesn't point out is new development in Montreal. you can see the patch of green to the east of the Montreal housing map where Griffontown and North Verdun (the more recently developed areas of the city) are moving towards condo style housing. rent prices have been trending higher too, but I suppose you could say that about the rest of the country too.
not criticizing the post, and it's one of my favourite cities to live. but the problems are coming here too.
So the problem is the new development or what? Aren't more people people require more hosing? Or you have something different in mind by ' the problems are coming here too'?
The previous mayors allowed areas to be rezoned to dense residential without investing in public infrastructure so you end up with neighborhoods full of condo towers with no schools or hospitals and very little public transit.
I think you mean little burgundy, north Verdun is full of older triplexes. You're right though, the previous two mayors really screwed up the new developments around Griffintown, Lachine's first avenue and the Children's Square. I'm also not very hopeful about the future RoyalMount project even though that's technically not part of the city of Montreal.
Well sure it could be, if that's what we all wanted.
Some people don't like urban super-metropolises at all. Even if they are really polite. Or nice like Montreal not like Toronto.
In population, the US and Canada are dominated by mega-cities. But in number of communities, cities are dwarfed by towns and rural areas. You must remember there is enough open space here to live affordably in small distributed communities. Cities don't need to be better, they need to go away.
I don’t understand the attack on detached family home. We have a lot of land. And enough natural resources to fund enough renewable ventures such as EV adoption and renewable energy production. This seems to be a wider effort by a group of loud mouths to discourage families to single family homes while investors gobble up SFHs in North America at record speed. I mean who do you think are going to own the lions share of multi family housing they espouse?
The authors best argument seems to be well connected public transport but that argument falls pretty quickly if you go outside the core. Suburbs like Laval land Brossard are just as bad and take over an hour to reach downtown. And there is enormous amount of corruption- most of past Montreal mayors have faced corruption charges , it is so ingrained.
>And enough natural resources to fund enough renewable ventures such as EV adoption and renewable energy production.
It's not just cars to move people. It's getting water to each house. And electrical to each house (hope it survives that recent storm!) And groceries to each house. And fire department coverage of each house. And Ambulance coverage to each house. And kids to school from each house. It's just a million things that are all made less efficient by choice.
And honestly, fine! Allow the people who want cars and SFH to have cars and SFH. But the problem that people ignore is that cars and SFH are the only affordable option in most of North America because of intentional policy choices and that is what articles like this are fighting.
Detached housing increases mean distance between households. This increase leads to increased need for longer roads more infrastructure etc. This is the obvious. What is not obvious is the social impact of this.
As a kid I was able to walk and bike into school. The independence was great and I had lots of adventures on the way home with my friends on the way back from school. Only when we moved to a single family home further away from school I had to rely on the bus that only came once an hour and even more infrequent when its later in the afternoon, I saw my friends less.
This just a stupid anecdote of mine but I do see the pattern: people that live further away, see each other less and do less together. I can walk 5 min to the subway station and be at the front door of any circa 1.5m people in my city within 30 minutes. Not possible with detached housing. Subways only make sense in somewhat denser environments.
This all before talking about energy efficiency. Since I have other tenants left and right of me, I basically don't didn't even need to turn the heating on that much last winter.
Also I can walk to the corner of the city block and get fresh and warm bread from my favorite bakery. It's also right opposite of a very good pizza place. Not possible in suburbia.
If I wanna see some green and meet friends to play volleyball or a picnic I go to the public park instead of my private garden. The park is maintained by professional landscapers and gardeners, I wouldn't even have the time to care about my own garden.
I would suffer horribly in detached home suburbia and also have a far larger environmental footprint, so why do it?
And I can sleep as long as I want without being awoken by my neighbors throwing stuff at the walls or dropping it on the floor, or slamming doors, or having an animated conversation in front of my door, or having an argument or a party in the courtyard or any other nuisance that people create for each other when living in multi-family buildings. No subway can replace this.
Single family homes in high-demand/land-constrained cities often make up >66% of the allowed zoning (see San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, etc); By definition this is not a good allotment of land and resources in high demand areas (you are fitting 1 family where you could fit 2-4 families with little immediate change in the neighborhood).
No one is saying ban building of single family homes, but the amount of land exclusively zoned for single family homes in high demand areas needs to be rebalanced -- if you want the conveniences of a single family home in an urban city, you should be prepared to pay for it (think Upper East Side brownstones), or move further outside the city. But there is no reason that the vast majority of homes in a city MUST be single family homes.
I say this as someone who owns a single family home in Los Angeles, and supported the conversion directly next door to me of a single family home into what is now a four-plex.
Rent is cheap because people are leaving the xenophobic environment. There's always some referendum talk on a 20 year cycle to keep the rates low, 70s, 90, 10s.
So yeah there's a huge Brain Drain from Anglo/English speaking Immigrant populations, as well as people fed up with the corruption.
Wow, what a take. I seriously doubt that people in Montreal/Quebec are more or less xenophobic than the average North American; if you have data supporting this I'd be happy to change my mind.
Also please be more skeptical of thoughts of the form "X is Y because of hot take Z". Reality is complex and things have many causes. Montreal has a long history of doing city planning differently than other cities in Canada.
Having been closely tied to Real Estate and landlords, this is the current understanding of most realtors that deal in English Montreal and its surrounding areas. Sure it may not be the only reason, but it is a definite factor.
As for examples of xenophobia, I don't know of any other places where they have a separate language police, I know personally of non-white owned stores being harassed and fined for having the wrong accent on their french sign. There are countless politicians who've blamed immigrants for their woes, Jacques Parizeau being a famous one for blaming the Ethnic votes for their loss. CAQ just took a majority, look up Bill 21.
While I don't think rent and xenophobia are related, it really is palpable here specially when you're immigrant and specially now during election (Quebec election are happening next Monday)
I know, the CAQ is full of xenophobes, and it can suck not looking white in Quebec (although much less so in Montreal). I'm skeptical that it drives rent prices in any detectable way.
Having lived in Montreal it's probably in the top end of the most inclusive place I have been.
The only thing i feel like parent could be referring to is the language laws, but the reasoning here is that they are necessary when surrounded by english (and has nothing to do with race). Plus language laws are barely respected already.
Of all the places I've lived in and visited, Montreal was the only place so far where random people on the street had a problem with me, based on the way I look - got this way around the time the current government was elected. However, one thing to remember with rents is that the city mandates the percent of allowed rent increases plus it's nearly impossible to evict someone, which I suspect has a non trivial effect on rents.
The author is using Toronto as a stand-in for a typical North American city, when in fact it's actually pretty bizarre and unique with respect to density-- I can't think of any American city structured similarly.
Dense downtown core, though Toronto has more people living there versus just offices. (Though that's been changing for a while now in Chicago). Similar scope of mass transit, where the trains don’t reach big chunks of what used to be suburbs and surrounding communities. Similar population. Great big ol’ lake right there.
"Missing middle" construction seems inefficient for heating and Montreal gets cold. It probably helped for cooling in the summer before A/C existed, but compared with here in the midwest (not even anywhere south) Us, Montreal doesn't really get that hot. "Missing middle" is a style I'd expect more in Mediterranean climates, like southern California.
It's also not as good is insulating for things like sound. Maybe that's a cultural difference. What part of France were a lot of the immigrants to Montreal originally from?
Can anyone explain this article to me? Why would America want to be like Montreal at all? A fair amount of US was built with some considerations in mind. I am not sure what Montreal has to offer here.
I wonder what historical forces led to this different type of development. Already by the time of the American Revolution, the Quebecois were ambivalent at best towards their erstwhile mother country, so I don't think it's a matter of continued French influence over the centuries.
I think much of it has to do with how old the city is. It’s about as old as New York City but didn’t have the same level of explosive growth, which I suspect gave it time to settle in and grow more like a European city. The somewhat limited island space would have also contributed to denser growth.
A lot of it is actually, I think, a consequence of heating during winter. A lot of the denser parts of Montréal have been built at a time where Hydro-electricity wasn't developed. Houses were heated by coal and oil mainly, which was delivered in small streets build behind the building as the stuff was nasty. Getting greather density meant easier delivery. This is only speculation.
Whatever it is they are speaking, French it ain't. It's a _superthick_ accent. I have the same with many a Brit btw, they can produce some of the most ununderstandable English I've ever heard.
The Québecois, and French Canadians as a whole, speak perfect French. Of course they have an accent, but so do Texans and the Scottish, yet it's still English.
> Don’t get me wrong, I think highrise condos and single family detached homes have their place. Lots of people want a large home with a lawn. But more than anything people want an affordable place to live, close to their work, their family, friends, etc. There's a reason the realtor's motto is location, location, location. It would be nice if detached homes and condo towers weren’t essentially the only two housing options in most of North America. It would be nice if more people could live where they want to live. I imagine that if people were given the option to live in the kinds of communities that I found in Montreal, many – not all, of course! – would.
I have also been watching videos on YouTube by a channel called "Oh The Urbanity!" which is about urban design and how cities can be made more walkable, bikeable, and all around easier and safer to get around in. They often highlight Montreal in their videos, and it's made me want to visit for a week just to experience what it would be like living in such a city. [1] is a video that had some particularly strong arguments that I enjoyed.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xXZaLMlXvs