Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Montreal is what North America could be

loukidelis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 119 posts

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#51

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

johnatwork wrote: post #17
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.

I would not raise a family in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve

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.

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#52

Post by hardwaregeek »

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…

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.

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#53

Post by ska »

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…

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.

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#54

Post by betaby »

gdsdfe wrote: post #45
betaby wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

But that's typical narrative in Canada in general - 'look at least it's not bad compared to USA'.

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#55

Post by joshl32532 »

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…

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".

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#57

Post by betaby »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #48

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.

Montreal has probably the best public transit in north America. Can't think of anything else really.

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#58

Post by mercy_dude »

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.

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#59

Post by hclalpha »

atdrummond wrote: post #7
boringg wrote: post #2

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!

I wasn’t too impressed during my visits for conventions there. Love Quebec City though, even if they were burning American flags there the two times I visited on Jean Baptiste day.

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.

Re: Montreal is what North America could be

#60

Post by zaptheimpaler »

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…

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.

Post reply on HN