April 1st, 2025
Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante announces plans for new neighborhood around Bridge-Bonaventure
Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante spoke today from Microbrasserie 4 Origines in Point Sainte-Charles, about the cities plans to construct high rise buildings in the area around the brasserie – and not everyone is pleased with the news.
Many residents of the Point Sainte-Charles district fear that this will lead to soulless buildings like those that have appeared across the skyline in Griffintown – a once working class neighborhood not unlike Point Sainte-Charles; or The Point as locals call it.
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Today, Griffintown is filled with high rise condo buildings and hotels, with a serious lack of amenities such as schools, health care buildings, green spaces and parks.
Plante’s plan is to construct a densely populated area featuring large residential towers filled with off-market housing.
The plan features up to 13,500 housing units, as well as businesses, schools, includes 43 hectares of green space, including a beach and swimming area – and of course, more bike paths. 12 kilometers worth to be exact.
The project also plans to increase public transit to the area, including another REM station – although there wasn’t any talk of car parks for the residents of these 13,500 new homes, in an area that already struggles with traffic congestion.
Apparently, the city of Montreal wants at least 40 per cent of those new housing units to be off-market. Off-market housing could be either affordable units, which are rental units intended to be offered at or below market rates, or social housing units, which are managed by the city and where tenants pay rent decided by a percentage of their income – yet there wasn’t any indication of how much of that off-market housing would be devoted to social or affordable units.
“We will make this an exemplary neighbourhood that includes an employment hub, affordable housing and green spaces linked to the river, just a stone’s throw from downtown,” said Plante.
“We will make this an exemplary neighborhood that includes an employment hub, affordable housing and green spaces linked to the river, just a stone’s throw from downtown,” said Plante.
In February of 2019, Plante said that plans for a new baseball stadium built at the Peel basin where under consideration, with the goal of bringing Major League Baseball back to the city, through an investors group that included former Montreal Canadiens president Pierre Boivin and Stephen Bronfman.
However, Major League Baseball (MLB) rejected a proposal for the Tampa Bay Rays to share a ball club with Montreal, which was part of the plan to bring a Major League Baseball team back to Montreal. This decision by MLB effectively put an end to the Sister City plan, which was one of the key proposals for the stadium’s development.
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The project is estimated to take up to thirty years to finalize – and you could bet your life savings that the affordable low-cost and social hosing parts of the project won’t be the first bits to be built. Which raises the question – does this project really help the people, or is this about developers getting richer off of yet more luxury condos built in working class neighborhoods?
Despite the smoke and mirrors, it sure seems like those Griffintown style high rises are going to creep across the canal.
