Most people don’t venture into Saint-Pierre unless they live there, work there, or are truly lost. The neighbourhood is islated between two railway lines and a highway; its main street, a segment of Saint-Jacques, doubles as a trucking route. But despite these challenges, this part of the Lachine borough is close to the city centre and is currently experiencing a boom in housing. A committee of citizens and municipal employees recently took on the daunting ...

Of the 864 census tracts in the Montreal Metropolitan Area, only three doubled their populations between 2001 and 2006. Two of the three cover areas in the Ville-Marie borough, as seen in the map below. Such rapid growth in population is in large part due to public-private programs designed to bring residents downtown, albeit with somewhat different outcomes in each tract. In this post I want to show a difference in how private-sector influence in ...

Cute graffiti at stop light, Ste. Catherine and Sanguinet

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and Who’s Your City?, published an epic, upbeat editorial in the Gazette yesterday, putting Montreal ahead of the curve in terms of North American cities with the creative energy to overcome the pending financial crisis: With credit tight and in some cases unavailable, the real economy, real people and real creativity replace finance capital as the new coin of the realm. Montreal has this in ...