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Montreal is what North America could be

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Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#101

Post by Apocryphon »

rahen wrote: post #98
brnt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In fact, they could even claim to speak a truer form of French than the Parisien variety.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/deplorable-que...

It's similar to how American English preserves what modern British English has since lost.

https://www.languagehumanities.org/what-is-the-difference-be...

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#102

Post by TheCoelacanth »

zzbzq wrote: post #13
pessimizer wrote: post #4

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 n…

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 a…

If single family homes were so clearly superior, you wouldn't need to ban everything else.

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#103

Post by [deleted] »

sabjut wrote: post #84
mercy_dude wrote: post #58

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…

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 hom…

[deleted]

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#104

Post by glouwbug »

seszett wrote: post #87
glouwbug wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember, kids, it's only racist if you're the majority /s

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

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#105

Post by ska »

pessimizer wrote: post #62
ska wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 journe…

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.

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#107

Post by Trias11 »

martin_drapeau wrote: post #3

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.

Besides absolutely miserable winters, french-enfrocement for businesses and chronic low-ball salaries for high tech jobs.

However summers are lovely albeit short, old Montreal is cute, and yes, cousine is delicious.

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#109

Post by fargle »

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.

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#110

Post by pandaman »

sabjut wrote: post #84
mercy_dude wrote: post #58

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…

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 hom…

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.
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