41–50 of 119 posts
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.
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…
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.
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
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2021001/article... https://spvm.qc.ca/upload/02/2021_Activity_Report_SPVM_EN_VF...
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.
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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
Compared with the same-sized US cities Montreal is OK. However safety wise it's not the same Montreal it used to be 10 years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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)
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.
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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.
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.
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. Great to visit in the summer though!
Aerospace and Video Games seem like 2 massive industries for the city?