A vote was held Wednesday evening to close several English-language schools but not others, as enrollment continues to fall.
Updates from January, 2012 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
-
Social housing here and elsewhere in Canada is facing a crisis as federal guarantees made 25 years ago lapse. I note that there’s not even a sentence here that suggests the current federal government might be asked to reinstate the grants.
-
Robert J
I would be curious to know what kind of rents you pay when you are eligible for social housing in Montreal. If you go on Padmapper regularly, you see that there is no lack of cheap rental property (by this I mean like its very possible to split 600$ of rent 2 ways and live in a 4 1/2) walking distance from metro stations (not in Ville-Marie or the Plateau, but almost everywhere else). Is social housing significantly cheaper? Why don’t we create some kind of housing service that takes advantage of these properties in assisting people to find them and sign legal leases (and reserve social housing for people who can’t work), and maybe a rent allocation system like France.
Cheap housing is available in this cities for the resourceful.
-
Kate
I am no expert, but I think social housing is mostly for people with families. An unencumbered single person can split a 4 1/2 with someone and live fairly well, more or less (not all apartments called 4 1/2 offer two distinct bedrooms). But take a single mom, she can’t cram her kids and herself into half of a 4 1/2.
I looked at the Habitations Jeanne-Mance last summer and they looked so pleasant I checked into the requirements for living there. Having children is #1 on the list – being on welfare, being older than a certain cut-off age also qualify you to apply. Merely being a semi-employed childless bohemian is not enough.
-
Robert J
Ok. So let’s say you need a 3 bedroom 7 1/2 to live well with 2-3 children. I’d like to see the difference in rent payments between social housing and the average price of a 7 1/2 in say Ahuntsic, within 1 km of a metro station.
I’m not taking a stance here against social housing. I’d just be curious to see those numbers.
-
Kate
It would be hard to compare because while regular apartments have prices, in social housing you pay 1/4 of your income, so there’s no firmly pegged rent level. Given that rents have zoomed out of proportion to the income brought in by minimum wage workers, yes, the people living in social housing are almost certainly paying well below market value for the same space in even the more modest neighbourhoods. (There is also a big black market in employing people here below minimum wage, a story that really needs to be told, but that’s another issue.)
-
Robert J
Maybe. But Montreal has about the cheapest rent of any large, modern city in the world, and Quebec has about the strictest laws around rent control of any modern state. Rent is more expensive anywhere in Europe except maybe Portugal, and in America anywhere except Detroit. This is sort of like the tuition thing. We already pay so little, that any new initiatives need to be moderate.
-
Kate
Well, you run into a boundary where people are being paid lower wages than would permit them to live in even marginally acceptable conditions. Subsidizing social housing helps the tenants in the short term, but in the long term it really helps the business owners that employ people at super low wages. You’re enabling that to continue.
But if you pull the plug on the subsidies, it’s not the business owners who get hurt, but the tenants and their dependents who will then find themselves at the mercy of the rental market. Sure, everyone should demand at least minimum wage and decent treatment from their employers, but not everyone is equipped to make such demands, especially in a shaky economy like we’re seeing this decade.
That’s assuming some of the folks living in social housing work, and I’m pretty sure they do. There are cars parked in Habitations Jeanne-Mance. But it’s clear that some of the people living there are simply only marginally employable, if that – they’re recent immigrants, they probably don’t speak sufficient French or even English, they’re not white. What are you going to do with them?
-
Martin
Robert J is wrong on most accounts. He does not know for instance that 150+ cities in the USA have stricter rent control laws than in Quebec. He does not know that rents in Montreal are no cheaper than elsewhere once you throw in salaries and costs of life. He assumes that rents in the private market somehow reflects the value of the appartments, while in truth they are in large part determined by speculation (and therefore profits end up in speculators’ pockets) while social housing is cheaper because thre is no speculation (but there is plenty profits to be made, from constructors to banks and employers). Etc. Finally, rent in social housing is for some renters 1/4 of income, for subsidized apartments. For other flats, they are only the addition of total costs of financing the project divided by apartment size. Oh and one last thing. Social housing costs less to the collectivity than private housing, since there is no speculation involved. So the more there is, the better for all of us – well,almost all of us…
-
Robert J
Rent control in Quebec is peculiar in that there is no deposit (or key deposit), no asking for 1st and last months rent, and very few agency fees. I think this is excellent and assures a much higher level of mobility than in many other places. I live in France right now and renting an apartment is much much more complicated than in Montreal. You pay 1st and last, key deposit of like 40euros, and an agency fee (not a deposit) equivalent to one months rent. Then they check to make sure you earn 4 times your rent in monthly salary (that is a standard practice everywhere). For our small T2 (2 1/2) in Provence, we had to come up with 2000 euros just to move in (rent is 650– cheap for our area). I have friends in Paris who ended up renting in rooming houses with shared bathrooms 20k outside of the center, because nobody would rent to them for lack of guarantee. Most renters in France also live in fear of braking anything on the premises or even just pissing off the owner, because they know they won’t be able to get back deposits (imagine if you deposit like 2000 euros for a family apartment).
Now that’s a little extreme because France is small and property is expensive, but I think you’d find very similar practices in New York or Ontario (hefty deposits, no standard lease forms, agency fees, strict profiling). I know someone in Ottawa who had to get her mother as guarantor even though she’s been employed as university admin staff for 15 years. This is very very rare in Montreal.
As I said, I’m not against social housing. I just want to point out that the rental market is pretty damn good in Montreal.
Another point: I don’t think the agencies that handle social housing do it very well. Habitations Jeanne-Mance has had half a century to pretty up (and has done so beautifully nonetheless) but was a hole in downtown for a long time (high levels of drug use traficking mostly).
-
-
Another story about the new Rosemont library whose operational costs the city of Montreal refuses to fund, but the borough says it can’t afford.
-
Some pics of the Village des neiges – I’m vaguely curious to see pictures of how it looks because it costs actual money to go look at it.
Chris DeWolf looks at biking in Montreal with a photo slideshow.
The Plateau’s St-Louis-de-France church was sold to an evangelistic sect two years ago, and they’ve destroyed and thrown away a large mural painting done by Italian-Montreal artist Joseph Guardo in 1952.
-
Antonio
These idiots remind me of the Taliban who destroyed those Buddhas carved into the mountains of Afghanistan. They’ve shown complete disregard for Quebec’s religious and artistic heritage as well as its history. Outrageous and despicable. If only these people had two gray cells to rub together and realize how abominable they truly are.
-
-
A European study finds that anglophones live slightly longer than francophones in Quebec, an advantage that seems to come down to smoking less.
-
I’m signed up for the Studio XX Drupal workshop (Wednesday evenings through February and March). It’s been delayed for lack of participants so I’m posting this here and elsewhere to help them find a few more bodies.
Drupal is a complicated but incredibly versatile content management system. I’ve worked with it a little bit, and am well aware potential users would benefit from some organized instruction before embarking on using it.
-
Alexis Nihon Plaza will be the site of an accessibility experiment over the next few years as a research centre uses it as the subject of an extensive effort to make the entire mall open to people with physical disabilities.
-
Some tenants in the Plateau are finding themselves fighting speculators trying to turn a quick buck by pushing them out and selling off flats as condos with little improvement. Other Plateau residents are upset about the cost of parking stickers and the borough’s establishment of more stickered areas without discussion.
-
Charles
I thought there was a moratorium on condo conversions on the Plateau… if not, the city could easily stop this.
-
Léo
@Charles
My understanding is that while converting into Divise type condos (each unit is independant) is regulated, converting into Indivise type condos (what you own is actually a % of the multiplex as opposed to an independant unit) isn’t.
-
DC
Léo is right, but if the landlord doesn’t own the unit 100%, he or she can’t evict you by claiming that the landlord will install themselves or a family member there. You can quite successfully fight eviction from a copropriété indivise on those grounds. When your landlord claims that ownership of the building has changed, always check to see who’s paying the taxes at the borough, and look up the details of the mortgage and title at the Régie des rentes.
-
-
Presentation of a video on the light installations at the Quartier des spectacles (loudish music); Radio-Canada report on how the city’s a mecca for video game programming; Quebec advertisements from the 70s, 80s, 90s (leading off with the immortal Il fait beau dans l’métro); a Bell Centre crowd cheers madly for Jaroslav Halak even though he shut the Canadiens out 3-0 on Tuesday night.
-
For folks who remember the Faubourg Ste-Catherine as a fairly lively spot with pretty good ethnic fast food upstairs, a visit now can come as a shock, the interior space poorly subdivided, street accesses blocked, the third-floor food court feeling empty and deserted. OpenFile looks into the reasons why this happened despite its location in the midst of thousands of hungry university students.
-
Shawn
Yes, I’m inclined to think that they really screwed this up: I was a regular at the Faubourg in its glory days, including the cinema. Then again, I’ve also been surprised to see what has happened with the Marche de l’Ouest, a similarly styled (imo) food court/market in DDO, which used to be jam packed and had lots of vacancies, when I last was there. Maybe it isn’t just a question of bad management at the Faubourg, but also a shift in tastes, or over-saturation of food court/markets…?
-
Kate
A much more vibrant food scene is available around that area now, which might partly be responsible – but that story leaves certain things unmentioned. Could the owners be trying to starve it off so that the land can be sold for a more profitable development?
-
Rajjer Rabbit
When the cinema closed, the SAQ started using the mall to warehouse stock, and the configuration of the mall changed. It now doesn’t have a good flow to it and has been kept in a state of disrepair. Renovations were never completed.
-
Marc
I was in there a few days before Xmas and my jaw dropped. I used to often go 20 or so years ago. You even crowds on the sidewalk watching the bagels being made at the sub-floor level bagel shop (which I’m surprised is still there). The place is hard to navigate, hard to get in/out of and had a funny smell. Not inviting at all.
By contrast, Marché de l’ouest is quite nice the way it’s been redone; and it smells so good in there.
-
Michael Black
But it was a well-balanced place when in good shape. The first floor was small food stores, a fish place, a bakery, Plantation for fruits and vegetables, some sort of butcher, the bulk food place, I can’t remember what all.
The second floor was small boutiques, I can’t remember what, but not just a party store but gift shops and at least one souvenir store and I think an antique store. It was bustling.
And then the the third floor was the food court, which is the one thing that has grown up in the area outside the complex.
It was modeled after similar things in other cities, I remember visiting something like it in Granville Island in Vancouver in the mid-eighties. The food stores were small, each dealing in one item, and that hasn’t really been duplicated in the area. And they seemed to do well. Plantation went bust, but I thought the problem was related to something else, since it seemed to predate the decline of the rest. PA opened up on Fort Street towards Plantation’s end, and is a similar place for fruits and vegetables, but is also a larger grocery store in general. Oddly, while Plantation was open, there were at least two small produce stores on St. Catherine Street near le Foubourg, but the eventually closed up, I can’t remember exactly when.
The small boutiques seemed to do well, certainly there was lots of reason for people to go into the building and then get lured into the boutiques. But I’m not sure the surrounding area has the variety that happened at le Foubourg.
For a long time, there was a store selling remaindered books, I’m not sure if it was the same business. It moved around, starting out on the second floor, and multiple locations on the first loor, giving up eventually when they were in the former Plantation location.
And I don’t know if it was underused space, or left empty deliberately, but there was an area at the west end of the second floor that was used for temporary things, like a craft fair around Christmas, and I seem to recall non-profit displays at a time or two.
Remember, when it first opened up, there was a Pascal’s hardware store at the eastern end, which was later used by Nexus bookstore, which had previously been on Peel just below Sherbrooke Street.
It was all well balanced, and wasn’t just “another food court”. And it’s been so long, I can’t remember the sequence of decline. I remember the period of endless renovation, that doesn’t seem to have ever been finished, but I can’t remember if the place seemed to be less busy or the stores closing down predated the renovations or not.
I didn’t even think the bagel place was still in operation. Any time I’ve looked, nobody’s been in there, yet everything remains, like it was suddenly abandoned. I just no longer go into the place, there’s nothing to draw me, so I have no idea what remains on the upper floors.
Michael
-
Shawn
Thanks Michael. Yes, in its day it felt like the Faneuil Hall marketplace in Boston, at least to me. Fabulous middle eastern tea place on the ground flloor; the first Hot ‘n Spicy; great little gourmet food shops. Sad that they screwed it up.
I remember talking to the guy who first opened the Poulet Tikka place (I was a regular) and he fled the high rents to help open a food court a little further east on Ste Catherine, on the second floor, around Stanley, I think. Remember that? That died even faster.
-
Kate
Oh wow, I remember the tea place – you could get mint tea in one of those elaborate metal pots, and great pastries too. They had a picture of the king of Morocco on the wall. The Faubourg definitely had a vibe of its own back in the day.
-
Guillaume St-Jean
L’université Concordia a acheté l’édifice. L’immeuble sera converti en espace à bureaux/salles de cours dans les prochaines années.
-
Kate
Vraiment? L’article sur OpenFile dit: “Concordia University and its student union were supposed to buy the Faubourg together and transform the building into a student centre, but that deal went sour in September after the student union shut it down.” Article dans The Link d’11 octobre 2011.
-
James
I was under the same impression. The (previous) student union tried multiple times to coerce students into buying it and making it into some horrific student space thing which no-one wanted. One of the very few positive developments at Concordia in the past 5 years has been the rejection of that plan.
-
Robert J
Yeah a large public space likes that needs to be shared between students and the general public. The more Concordia buys up spaces on that stretch of Ste-Catherine the less mixed the neighborhood becomes. A strong student presence helps to keep the neighborhood young and dynamic, but mixed commercial spaces help to keep the neighborhood alive for more permanent residents.
-
Kate
I totally agree with you there, Robert J. Concordia should take care not to kill the goose that’s laying the golden eggs.
-
-
A vigil was held for Farshad Mohammadi Tuesday at Bonaventure metro, probably the most concern ever expressed for the man shot by police there on Friday.
The Gazette’s Linda Gyulai finds that the Mohammadi case reveals gaps in care for mentally disturbed people, particularly in the persistent if visibly debunked notion that everyone can safely be cared for in the community.
-
Doobious
Globe and Mail article about the varying amount of training other police forces receive to help them deal with the mentally ill.
-
-
The STM has a page up explaining the bus number changes and the reasons for them.
-
ant6n
It’d be cool if they could untangle the name space between the 10 minute buses and the ‘normal’ buses; i.e. by giving the 10 minute buses the range 10-99, and the others the range 100-299. Then you wouldn’t even need a frequent service map.
Of course that would result in a lot of name changes, and one would have to plan it in the long term, in case another 100-299 line gets ‘upgraded’ to be a 11-99 line.
-
Kate
I imagine these changes are expensive enough, what with having to reprint maps, recode the website, and generally publicize the changes. And some of the route numbers predate buses and used to belong to tramlines, so it would be kind of a shame to mess with them.
-
Jack 09:17 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
The Commissioners punted, demographically these decisions are going to have to be made. They are frightened silly about closing a school in their districts, due to low voter turnout they know they’ll lose the subsequent election. Another question is this , how many anglophones do you know that send their kids to french schools? I think this fact is becoming more of an issue than people think.
Robert J 10:21 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
The future of education in Quebec is inevitably to have one school board. Having two is administratively inefficient. The English community should cut their losses and negotiate for a better English program within the French system. Top notch English classes for everyone and the option to take certain other subjects in English would encourage bilingualism while getting rid of the issue of maintaining separate infrastructure for a minority.
The people in the EMSB could concentrate their energy on defending the quality of English instruction, rather than running a school board. No matter what your political point of view, there needs to be more communication between the English and French people of Quebec. Anything that encourages segregation based on language will perpetuate a lack of understanding and ultimately a huge waste of resources (the hospital system retains elements of segregation and is another example of how lack of communication is bad for everyone).
JaneyB 11:33 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
I would like to see dual-track schools come to Quebec. (Maybe they’re here and I just don’t know about them….) They exist in Winnipeg and have for decades. Kids can take all Anglo, all Franco or mix-and-match. Only the bigger schools can pull this off and as far as I know it is only high schools – but I could be wrong. When I go by Cegeps Vanier and St-Laurent, which are basically on the same plot of land, I really don’t understand why they aren’t just combined. Well…I do understand but…
Jack 12:47 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
Robert I agree with you , the only reason their are separate school boards was the weight of the English -speaking community in 1867. A huge concentration of wealth along with 25% of the population makes negotiating easier. The people who would be dead set against this move are people who have vested political or financial interests in this separation.
The layers of bureaucracy in this system was exemplified in a Gazette article 2 days ago where Ben Huot ( President of the English school board negotiating team) defended his position and his organization basically by saying, because we are better.
Robert J 14:02 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
I actually firmly believe the English school board has certain resources that the French doesn’t. French public schools have been playing catch-up since the Quiet Revolution. This is all the more reason that the French system can benefit from anglo expertise, while anglos can benefit from physical infrastructure of the French system. The priority needs to be creating a great public system, and discouraging people from resorting to private schools (Montreal has about the highest rate of private school attendance in North America I believe).
Kevin 15:46 on 2012/01/12 Permalink
The quality of French public schools would skyrocket overnight if the government stopped subsidizing French private schools.
Where else can you go to private school for $3000/yr?