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Je n'ai pas trouvé de thread pour ce projet de réno. LaPresse parle de ce projet aujourd'hui Publié le 08 mars 2014 à 09h08 | Mis à jour à 09h09 Conversion d'un monument historique en condos par Karsten Rump L'ordonnance de fermeture du chantier des Appartements Bishop Court, angle Bishop et De Maisonneuve, a pris effet à la fin février, mais elle vient tout juste d'être officiellement enregistrée au palais de justice de Montréal. PHOTO OLIVIER PONTBRIAND, LA PRESSE VINCENT LAROUCHE La Presse La Commission de la construction du Québec ordonne l'arrêt immédiat des travaux de conversion d'un monument historique de grande valeur au centre-ville de Montréal, après avoir constaté que l'ancien «roi des peep-shows» de la métropole tentait d'y aménager des logements en usant de procédés douteux. L'ordonnance de fermeture du chantier des Appartements Bishop Court, angle Bishop et De Maisonneuve, a pris effet à la fin février, mais elle vient tout juste d'être officiellement enregistrée au palais de justice de Montréal. Le bâtiment de style néo-Tudor, classé «monument historique» et «immeuble de valeur patrimoniale exceptionnelle» par le gouvernement du Québec, a été construit en 1904 par les architectes Saxe et Archibald. L'Université Concordia y a longtemps eu des bureaux, puis elle a vendu l'immeuble pour 3,2 millions de dollars en 2010. D'importantes rénovations ont été entreprises pour y aménager des logements de prestige. Après une série de mésaventures financières et de problèmes avec des entrepreneurs en construction qui disaient ne pas avoir été payés, le projet a atterri entre les mains de l'homme d'affaires Karsten Rumpf. Rumpf avait été baptisé «le Roi des peep-shows» par le magazine Affaires Plus au cours des années 1990, car il était le plus important propriétaire de cinémas XXX à Montréal et Hamilton. Aujourd'hui, son adresse correspond à une boîte postale de Nassau, aux Bahamas, et l'homme s'est recyclé dans la gestion d'un imposant parc immobilier. Son représentant à Montréal n'a pas répondu à nos appels hier. La Commission de la construction dit avoir inspecté le chantier des Appartements Bishop Court à plusieurs reprises. Ses inspecteurs étaient mal reçus et avaient du mal à pénétrer sur les lieux et y ont découvert des travailleurs sans cartes de compétence. Pire, les travaux n'étaient même pas supervisés par un entrepreneur accrédité en bonne et due forme, selon eux. «Ils ont aussi constaté des problèmes qui pouvaient porter atteinte à la sécurité à cause des installations électriques», raconte Simon-Pierre Pouliot, porte-parole de l'organisme. Le propriétaire devra maintenant convaincre la Commission qu'il a régularisé la situation avant de pouvoir reprendre les travaux.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/montreal-decline-neil-macdonald-1.3501352 ANALYSIS Corruption probes, broken bridges, the sad decline of Montreal A great place to lunch, but the city's problems are more than sinkhole deep By Neil Macdonald, CBC News Posted: Mar 22, 2016 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Mar 22, 2016 5:00 AM ET The Turcot Interchange, in Montreal’s southwest borough near the McGill University Health Centre superhospital, is the meeting place for highways 15, 20 and 720, plus the onramp for the Champlain Bridge. Work on it has been caught up in the Charbonneau Commission corruption probe. (FOTOimages/MTQ) About The Author Neil Macdonald Senior Correspondent Neil Macdonald is a Senior Correspondent for CBC News, currently based in Ottawa. Prior to that he was the CBC's Washington correspondent for 12 years, and before that he spent five years reporting from the Middle East. He also had a previous career in newspapers, and speaks English and French fluently, and some Arabic. More by Neil Macdonald Video by Neil Macdonald Driving into Montreal last week, plunging down the concrete ditch of the Decarie Expressway from that weird left-lane exit off the Trans-Canada Highway, was, sorry, a bit like arriving in Beirut. Apologies to Beirut. That was a slur. Montreal's soaring overlay of traffic corridors weeps corrosion down their flaked and crumbling concrete exteriors. Lattices of rusted rebar pop everywhere. Bridges are wrapped in un-reassuring bandages of reinforcing material. A week or so earlier, on assignment, my CBC documentary crew navigated a similarly complex system of ramps, spirals, bridges, loops and cloverleafs in Houston. It practically sparkled. Smooth, brightly polished towers supported flawless pavement. Yes, Texas has a milder climate, but still Houston's system looked properly built and well maintained. Think about this: Texans pay just about the lowest tax rates between the Rio Grande and the Arctic Circle. Quebecers pay just about the highest. Nathalie Normandeau, ex-deputy premier, arrested by UPAC Quebec budget: Couillard tries to turn a page Fed up Montrealer fills pothole himself Mythologized Now, these observations won't be welcomed by readers in Quebec's metropolis. The ferocious devotion of Montrealers to Montreal (which I think runs even deeper among the city's Anglo residents) beggars the sometimes arrogant, self-proclaimed cosmopolitanism of Torontonians and smug contentment of Vancouverites. Montrealers believe that their city has a cultural richness equalled in North America only by cities like New Orleans or New York, and having lived there, I would agree. Aside from the international riot of its cuisine and its remarkable nightlife, Montreal is still gloriously louche. Eat lunch at a Montreal restaurant and you'll see wine on neighbouring tables. Imagine ordering alcohol at a business lunch in Toronto? No other Canadian city has been mythologized by the likes of Mordecai Richler or Leonard Cohen (or Robert Charlebois and Michel Tremblay or all the other playwrights and bards who have poured their love of the city into words and song). Montreal provokes a lifelong sentimentality in anyone who's lived there. But the city's pathologies, rather than its pleasures, are now what distinguishes it. Such is the state of the city's physical and social infrastructure that all the new spending in today's federal budget would only make a dent. <button class="play-button" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0px; margin: 0px; cursor: pointer; width: 151.797px; height: 258.75px; border: none; outline: none; background-image: url("data:image/png;base64,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"); background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: 50% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat;">Play Media</button> Montreal sinkhole swallows 2 cars2:53 Its tangle of decaying roads leads, among other places, to the second-busiest single-span bridge in Canada, the Champlain, which has for years been choked by chronic closures. It is literally in danger of collapse. That not only inflicts misery on the entire South Shore, with all its commuters, it distorts real estate prices, artificially inflating property values downtown. Who wouldn't pay a premium to avoid crossing Montreal's overcrowded bridges or sitting in standstill traffic on lanes to the West Island that seem eternally filled with construction detours? Don't get sick Something else you really don't want to do in Montreal: get sick. Quebec has been more permissive than any other province in allowing people to pay for their own medical care, for good reason: the public system isn't able to meet demand on its own. In fact, the province has had to deliberately limit its cohort of physicians. To boomers entering the age when you need care the most, that must be frightening. As you turn east into downtown at the bottom of the Decarie Expressway, the new McGill super-hospital perches on a hillside to your left. It was supposed to be a fresh alternative to over-crowded institutions like the Royal Victoria Hospital, which English-speaking Montrealers have endured for decades. Instead, it's emerged as a millennial version of the Olympic Stadium, the rotting monstrosity that sucked up $1.5 billion, and now sits, largely underused, in the city's East End. The super-hospital arrived vastly over budget, with thousands of defects, from defective wiring to lack of office space for physicians, to backups of stinking sewage, as the Montreal media have dutifully chronicled. Feast of corruption Like the "Big O," its construction was a feast for corrupt contractors and administrators. Several now face criminal charges. Just last week, the province's former deputy premier (and former minister of municipal affairs) was arrested for corruption, along with a slew of other public officials. Nathalie Normandeau: the rise and fall of a political star Nathalie Normandeau had actually testified at the 2014 hearings of the Charbonneau Commission, which was established to look into corruption in the construction industry and government contracts. Former Liberal deputy premier Nathalie Normandeau is one of seven people arrested last week on corruption charges in the wake of the Charbonneau Commission inquiry, which was established, reluctantly, by her former boss, Jean Charest. (Jacques Boissinot/Canadian Press) You have to wonder whether the Cliche Commission, which was established in the early 1970s to look into, yes, corruption in Quebec's construction industry, anticipated the need for another official inquiry just a few decades after one of its lawyers, a young Brian Mulroney, penned a savage indictment of blackmail, violence and payoffs. A Montreal businessman I've known for years, a fellow who has prospered in real estate management and who is now planning a move to Toronto, shrugs at all this. He's been paying kickbacks for years, and has a hard time believing it required a commission of inquiry to establish that corruption continues. Anyway, pity Montreal. My former colleagues and current friends there sneered amicably when I decided to return to the national capital rather than Montreal after nearly two decades abroad; there were all the usual japes about sleepy, dull, unbearably sterile little Ottawa. But in Ottawa, you actually get services for the taxes you pay, which are a lot lower than the levies Montrealers suffer, and you can find a doctor, and Mike Duffy's Senate expenses constitute a big scandal. Plus, as Pierre Trudeau's old friend Jean Marchand liked to say, if you get really bored there's always the train to Montreal.

Pendant ce temps, au Québec et au Canada, on recule. Accord de l'UE pour réduire de 40% ses GES d'ici 2030 JEAN-LUC BARDET Publié le 23 octobre 2014 à 19h20 Les dirigeants européens ont trouvé un accord vendredi sur un plan climat ambitieux pour mettre l'Europe en position de leader mondial dans la lutte contre le réchauffement de la planète. L'Union européenne prévoit une réduction d'au moins 40% de ses émissions de gaz à effet de serre d'ici 2030 par rapport à 1990. «Accord! Au moins 40% de réduction d'ici 2030. Accord du Conseil européen sur une politique énergétique et de climat la plus ambitieuse au monde», a écrit le président du Conseil européen, Herman Van Rompuy, sur son compte Twitter. Les 28 chefs d'État et de gouvernement se sont aussi entendus sur deux autres objectifs: porter la part des énergies renouvelables à 27% de la consommation et faire 27% d'économies d'énergie, a précisé M. Van Rompuy. Le premier est contraignant, mais à l'échelle de l'UE, pas de chaque Etat membre, et le deuxième objectif ne l'est pas. Les Européens, poussés notamment par l'Espagne et le Portugal, ont aussi décidé d'augmenter les «interconnexions» entre réseaux électriques au sein de l'Union, à 15% d'ici 2030, a précisé M. Van Rompuy. «C'est une bonne nouvelle pour le climat, les citoyens, la santé et les négociations internationales sur le climat à Paris en 2015», a estimé M. Van Rompuy, assurant que cela créerait «des emplois durables» et de la «compétitivité». L'accord a été obtenu à l'issue de discussions ardues qui ont duré près de huit heures à Bruxelles. C'est «un accord très ambitieux pour la planète. L'Europe montre l'exemple», s'est réjoui le président français François Hollande, qui accueillera la conférence de Paris fin 2015. «S'il n'y a pas d'accord» entre Européens, «comment convaincre les Chinois ou les Américains ?», avait-il demandé à son arrivée au sommet. Mécanismes de soutien La question du partage du fardeau était centrale entre les pays pauvres, principalement de l'est de l'Europe, qui dépendent encore largement des énergies fossiles comme le charbon, et les plus riches qui s'appuient sur le nucléaire ou sont déjà bien engagés dans la transition énergétique. Les premiers, emmenés par la Pologne, ont obtenu un «paquet de compensations» pour les aider à moderniser leur système énergétique, a indiqué une source européenne. Des mécanismes de soutien vont être créés à partir du système des quotas européens d'émission de CO2, notamment un fonds alimenté par une petite partie (2%) des ventes de ces certificats. De leur côté, l'Espagne et le Portugal exigeaient de meilleures interconnexions avec les réseaux énergétiques européens, un sujet qui provoque des frictions depuis des années entre l'Espagne et la France. Les Espagnols attendent notamment des financements dans le plan d'investissements de 300 milliards d'euros que doit présenter d'ici la fin de l'année la nouvelle Commission Juncker. L'amélioration des interconnexions fait partie des outils pour accroître l'indépendance énergétique de l'UE, un enjeu rendu encore plus crucial par la crise en Ukraine et les menaces sur l'approvisionnement en gaz russe. Vendredi sera consacré à l'économie et aux moyens de doper la croissance, à quelques jours de l'entrée en fonction de la Commission Juncker, qui en a fait sa première priorité. La discussion, entamée à 28, sera suivie d'un mini-sommet de la zone euro qui pourrait être animé par le débat sur les règles budgétaires européennes, au moment où les projets de budget de la France et de l'Italie sont sur la sellette de la Commission. http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/environnement/201410/23/01-4812075-accord-de-lue-pour-reduire-de-40-ses-ges-dici-2030.php

http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/dossiers/commission-charbonneau/201210/15/01-4583463-zambito-le-maire-vaillancourt-touchait-25-des-contrats-a-laval.php L'administration du maire de Laval, Gilles Vaillancourt, touchait 2,5% du montant des contrats octroyés à un cercle d'entreprises en construction, selon l'ex-entrepreneur Lino Zambito qui témoigne devant la commission Charbonneau. «À Laval, c'était clair, il y avait une ''cut'' de 2,5% que les entrepreneurs donnaient au maire de Laval, M. Vaillancourt, par le biais d'un intermédiaire», a déclaré M. Zambito. L'homme a poursuivi ce matin son témoignage devant la Commission en abordant l'octroi des contrats à Laval. L'ex-entrepreneur dit avoir rapidement réalisé après avoir fondé sa compagnie, Infrabec, qu'un cercle fermé d'entrepreneurs obtenait la majorité des contrats de construction sur l'île Jésus. Le cercle d'entreprises obtenant la quasi-totalité des contrats était composé des entreprises Construction Louisbourg, Poly Excavation, Nepcon, Mergad, Timberstone, Giuliani, Sintra division Laval, Gilles Dufresne Asphalte, Jocelyn DufresneInc. Plusieurs d'entre elles ont été perquisitionnées la semaine dernière, alors que la commission Charbonneau et le témoignage de Lino Zambito prenaient une pause. Il a fréquemment reçu des appels de ces entrepreneurs pour lui demander de «se tasser». Lino Zambito dit avoir accepté, mais avoir démontré son intérêt pour lui aussi décrocher descontrats en échange de sa collaboration. En 2002 ou 2003, on invite l'ex-entrepreneur à se rendre à l'ouverture d'un nouveau magasin à Dollard-des-Ormeaux appartenant à la famille de Gilles Vaillancourt. Le maire de Laval est présent et rencontre Lino Zambito à la fin de l'inauguration. Il lui aurait alors dit : «Ta job, ton contrat s'en vient sous peu. Les gars vont te dire lequel.» Peu de temps après, il était informé qu'il obtenait le contrat pour un projet sur le boulevard Cléroux. Lino Zambito dit vite avoir déchanté, le chantier ayant présenté plusieurs imprévus. L'ex-entrepreneur affirme avoir réalisé pour 400 000$ de travaux supplémentaires au contrat. Pour obtenir paiement, il affirme avoir eu à verser un pot-de-vin de 25 000$ au maire Vaillancourt. L'argent n'a pas été versé directement au politicien, mais à l'aide d'un intermédiaire, Marc Gendron de la firme de génie Tecsult. Le témoignage de M. Zambito se poursuit à 14h. On se penche sur le ministère des Transports.

Nom: Siège social de la Commission de la construction du Québec (CCQ) Hauteur: 8 étages/?? mètres Coût du projet: 62 000 000,00$ Promoteur: Commission de la construction du Québec Architecte: lemay associés Emplacement: 8475 Christophe-Colomb Début de construction: hiver 2009 Fin de construction: hiver 2011

Est-ce que l'article ci-dessous et un avertissement pour la préservation hyperactive de l'architecture Montréalaise? Preservation Follies http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_preservation-follies.html New York’s original Pennsylvania Railroad Station opened its doors in November 1910, with its towering Doric columns and a 150-foot-high waiting room based on the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. “As the crowd passed through the doors into the vast concourse,” the New York Times reported, “on every hand were heard exclamations of wonder, for none had any idea of the architectural beauty of the new structure.” But in the mid-1960s, the Pennsylvania Railroad tried to make up for falling revenues by razing the Beaux Arts structure—over the protests of architects and editorial boards—and replacing it with today’s drab station, the new Madison Square Garden, and rent-bearing office towers. The beloved old station became a martyr for the preservationist cause. In 1965, Mayor Robert Wagner signed the law establishing the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Initially, the move seemed like a harmless sop to the activist architects. But the commission’s power soon grew, partly because it was charged not only with protecting beautiful old structures but also with establishing large historic districts. Today, New York City contains just 1,200 individually landmarked buildings, far fewer than the 25,000 buildings within its 100 historic districts. And in these districts—1,300 acres’ worth in Manhattan alone—almost every action that affects a building’s exterior must pass muster with the commission, from installing air conditioners in windows to mounting intercom boxes next to front doors. A tree can grow in Brooklyn, but not in SoHo, unless the commission decides that its leaves are no affront to that neighborhood. It is wise and good to protect the most cherished parts of a city’s architectural history. But New York’s vast historic districts, which include thousands of utterly undistinguished structures, don’t accomplish that goal. Worse, they impede new construction, keeping real estate in New York City enormously expensive (despite a housing crash), especially in its most desirable, historically protected areas. It’s time to ask whether New York’s big historic districts make sense. According to a law passed in 1965, to bestow historic-district status on a neighborhood, the Landmarks Preservation Commission must hold public hearings, vote, and then submit its proposal to the city council, which must approve the designation. Once that happens, the commission has enormous powers over the new district: it may “specify the nature of any construction, reconstruction, alteration or demolition of any landscape feature which may be performed” within that district. The commission began landmarking speedily after the law was passed. From 1966 to 1981, it created 20 historic districts in southern Manhattan, at a rate of about 38 acres per year. (By “southern Manhattan,” I mean the island below 96th Street—the most expensive land in the city and some of the most expensive in the world.) The largest of these districts was Greenwich Village, which was landmarked in 1969. The plan to submit the Village to the commission’s oversight was embraced by most of its residents, despite their well-known history of fighting the government’s use of eminent domain to seize their property outright. Mayor Wagner said that he was “deeply concerned and sympathetic with the people of the West Village neighborhood in their desire to conserve and build constructively upon a neighborhood life which is an example of city community life at its healthiest.” Mayor-elect John Lindsay and mayor-to-be Ed Koch, a Village resident himself, also favored making the Village a historic district. Two property owners did file a lawsuit against the city, and large property-owning institutions like the New School and Saint Vincent’s Hospital also didn’t want their future building options curtailed. But in the end, the proposal passed, and a similar groundswell helped establish the SoHo Cast Iron District in 1973. In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed governments to landmark commercial areas without compensating the owners, giving the Landmarks Preservation Commission a green light to expand farther into areas that had many nonresidential properties. The largest of these was the Upper East Side. Once again, effective organizers, like New Yorker drama critic Brendan Gill, rallied a sophisticated community behind the districting plan. Opponents of the Upper East Side Historic District mounted a spirited defense, challenging the notion that this large swath of Manhattan had any kind of architectural unity, but they were overwhelmed. Paul Goldberger, writing in the Times, noted that the decision put the Koch administration “squarely on the side of preservation, rather than development, of some of the city’s most expensive real estate.” The Upper East Side Historic District was the high-water mark of preservationism in the age of Ed Koch. From May 1981 to May 1989, the commission added just five new districts in southern Manhattan, a rate of 2.82 acres per year. Perhaps the commissioner during much of this period, Gene Norman, didn’t believe in expansion as much as his predecessors did. Perhaps the commission was busy fighting other battles, like landmarking the Broadway theaters and preventing Saint Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue from erecting a tower. Or perhaps it was the spirit of the expansive eighties, when New York’s growth seemed like a pretty good thing. But then Norman resigned, and suddenly, perhaps coincidentally, historic districting soared. Between May 1989 and December 1993, 509 extra acres were added—a pace of over 100 acres per year. Tribeca, Ladies’ Mile, and the Upper West Side—a vast collection of extremely heterogeneous buildings, many of them with little architectural distinction—were just a few of the major districts brought under the commission’s control. The bulk of this districting occurred during the mayoralty of David Dinkins. Again, that may be the result of happenstance, or of Dinkins’s appointments to the commission, or of their sense that their decisions wouldn’t be overruled. But it’s worth noting that the districting explosion stopped as soon as Rudy Giuliani became mayor. Since 1993, the pace of historic districting in southern Manhattan has averaged about seven acres per year. Only one-tenth of the 1,200 acres that are now part of historic districts in southern Manhattan have been added since 1993. The Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, including their commission chairs—Jennifer Raab, Sheridan Hawkins, and Robert Tierney—have shown far more restraint in increasing their sway over Manhattan than most of their predecessors did. Nevertheless, the damage has been done. Not counting parks, southern Manhattan contains about 7,700 acres of potentially buildable area. Today, nearly 16 percent of that land is in historic districts and therefore subject to the commission’s authority. This preservation is freezing large tracts of land, rendering them unable to accommodate the thousands of people who would like to live in Manhattan but can’t afford to. To get an idea of the way that historic districts can freeze a city, consider two recent episodes. In 1999, Citibank sold a one-story branch bank on the corner of 91st and Madison Avenue to a developer who planned a 17-story tower for the site. But the corner was within the prestigious Carnegie Hill Historic District, whose distinguished residents didn’t like the idea of another tower in their neighborhood. Woody Allen made a short video protesting the plan. Kevin Kline recited Richard II: “How sour sweet music is, / When time is broke and no proportion kept!” No New Yorker who grew up hearing Kline play Henry V in Central Park can fault the commission for being swayed by his eloquence. It told the developer to limit the building to nine stories—even though one of the few limits to the commission’s power, explicitly stated in the New York City Administrative Code, is that “nothing contained in this chapter shall be construed as authorizing the commission, in acting with respect to any historic district or improvement therein, . . . to regulate or limit the height and bulk of buildings.” A few years later, the developer Aby Rosen wanted to erect a 22-story glass tower atop the old Sotheby Parke-Bernet building at 980 Madison Avenue, in the heart of the massive Upper East Side Historic District. Even though the building itself wasn’t landmarked, Rosen and his architect, Lord Norman Foster, proposed keeping the original building’s facade intact and letting the tower rise above it, much as the MetLife building rises above Grand Central Terminal. Once again, well-connected neighbors didn’t like the idea and took their complaints to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Tom Wolfe, the brilliant chronicler of the foibles of New York and the real-estate industry, penned a 1,500-word piece in the New York Times insinuating that if the commission approved the project, it would betray its mission. Wolfe won, and nothing was built. Replying to his critics (of whom I was one), Wolfe wrote in the Village Voice that “to take their theory to its logical conclusion would be to develop Central Park. . . . When you consider the thousands and thousands of people who could be housed in Central Park if they would only allow them to build it up, boy, the problem is on the way to being solved!” But building high-rises in dense neighborhoods means that you don’t have to build in green areas, whether they’re urban parks or undeveloped areas far from the city. In fact, a true preservationist should realize that building up in one area reduces the pressure to take down other buildings. Once the landmarks commission decides that a building can be knocked down—as was the case in the Battle of Carnegie Hill—it should logically demand that its replacement be as tall as possible. Does turning a neighborhood into a historic district actually discourage new construction, as these stories suggest? To find out, I couldn’t simply use data from the U.S. Census to see if regular districts boasted more housing growth than historic districts did, because historic districts don’t match up exactly with census tracts. So I have made comparisons among three kinds of census tracts: those that have no territory within a historic district; those that have some; and those with a majority of land in a historic district. During the 1980s, the mostly historic tracts added an average of 48 housing units apiece—noticeably fewer than the 280 units added in the partly historic tracts and the 258 units added in the nonhistoric tracts. In the 1990s, the mostly historic tracts lost an average of 94 housing units (thanks to unit consolidation or conversion to other uses), while the partly historic tracts lost an average of 46 units and the nonhistoric tracts added an average of 89 units. In short, census data show that there has indeed been less new housing built in historic districts, even though they are some of the most attractive areas in New York. A different approach to measuring new construction is to use consumer websites to look at high-rise buildings, which make the biggest contributions to the city’s housing stock. According to Emporis.com, just five residential buildings with more than 15 stories have been erected in historic districts in southern Manhattan since 1970; that’s an average of 0.004 buildings per acre, less than half the rate in nonhistoric southern Manhattan. Nybits.com, another website, lists 234 over-15-story residential buildings built in southern Manhattan since 1981. Of these, just 6 percent were built in historic districts, even though historic districts cover 16 percent of southern Manhattan. Neither website includes every new building erected in the city, but there’s no reason to suspect that they are disproportionately missing new buildings in historic districts. Again, we see that less new housing is built in historic districts—which shouldn’t be much of a surprise. The laws of supply and demand aren’t usually subject to legislative appeal: when the supply of something desirable is restricted, its price will typically rise. To find out whether prices have risen more quickly in historic districts than elsewhere, I have used data on more than 17,000 Manhattan condominium sales by the First American Corporation. The data cover the years between 1980 and 2002, avoiding the extreme price increases that occurred during the last eight years, and they include the addresses of the condos, making it possible to link them to historic districts. From 1980 through 1991, the average price of a midsize condominium (between 800 and 1,200 square feet) sold in a historic district was $494,043 in today’s dollars. From 1991 through 2002, that price was $582,671—an 18 percent increase. The average price of a midsize condo outside a historic district, meanwhile, barely rose in real dollars, from $581,865 in the first decade to just $583,352 in the second. In other words, even though condos within historic districts were cheaper than those outside historic districts in the 1980s, they had become equally expensive by the 1990s. Over the entire 1980–2002 period, prices each year rose $6,000 more in historic districts than outside them. The results tend to get stronger if you look at price per square foot, use statistical techniques to control for unit size, or expand the sample. For example, if you include units between 500 and 1,500 square feet, you’ll find that price per square foot increased by only about $5.50 outside historic districts from the first decade to the second (again, in real dollars)—but that within historic districts, the price per square foot rose from $530 to $596. The increasing cost of property in historic districts remains even if you control for those districts’ amenities, like proximity to Central Park, and if you allow that proximity to become more valuable over time. Restricting new construction in historic districts drives up the price of housing, then. This, in turn, increasingly makes those districts exclusive enclaves of the well-to-do, educated, and white. Census data about southern Manhattan show that in 2000, average household income in census tracts that were primarily in historic districts was $183,000 (in current dollars), which was 74 percent more than that of households in tracts outside historic districts. Almost three-quarters of the adults in the mostly historic tracts had college degrees, as opposed to 54 percent in tracts outside historic districts. And people in the majority-historic tracts were 20 percent more likely to be white. This alone isn’t surprising: architectural beauty is a luxury good, so one would expect that the prosperous would be willing to pay more to enjoy it. What’s disturbing is that historic-district status itself seems to make areas more exclusive over time, as limits on new development make it more difficult to build for people with lower incomes. In 1970, families in tracts that would eventually be located at least partly within historic districts had incomes 29 percent higher than families living outside such districts. By 2000, that gap had widened to 54 percent. Similarly, in 1970, people living in areas that would become historic districts were 4 percent more likely to be white than those outside these areas, as opposed to 15 percent 30 years later. Tracts in historic districts have also seen their share of residents with college degrees increase significantly faster than that of tracts outside historic districts. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs argued that “cities need old buildings” because “if a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction.” Jacobs was surely correct that cities benefit from having some less expensive real estate—but restricting the construction of new buildings doesn’t achieve that end. Prices stay low not when the building stock is frozen but when it increases to meet demand. Preservation doesn’t make New York accessible to a wider range of people; it turns the city into a preserve of the prosperous. As if it weren’t enough that large historic districts are associated with a reduction in housing supply, higher prices, and increasingly elite residents, there’s also an aesthetic reason to be skeptical about them: they protect an abundance of uninteresting buildings that are less attractive and exciting than new structures that could replace them. Not every city, it’s worth adding, has restricted construction in its most valuable areas. Chicago has allowed an enormous number of high-rise buildings with splendid views of Lake Michigan. The result is a city with a great deal of affordable luxury housing. It’s hard to fault the Landmarks Preservation Commission for stopping development in historic districts. That’s its job: to “safeguard the city’s historic, aesthetic and cultural heritage,” as the city’s administrative code puts it. The real question is whether these vast districts should ever have been created and whether they should remain protected ground in the years ahead. No living city’s future should become a prisoner to its past. Research for this article was supported by the Brunie Fund for New York Journalism. Edward L. Glaeser is a professor of economics at Harvard University, a City Journal contributing editor, and a Manhattan Institute senior fellow. He is grateful to Kristina Tobio for heroic research assistance.

Pour promouvoir son offre de vols à destination du Québec pour cet hiver, la compagnie aérienne Air Transat s’invite dans 239 salles de cinéma à Paris du 2 novembre au 13 décembre 2011, en diffusant un spot publicitaire de 20 secondes vantant cette région, réalisé en collaboration avec la Commission canadienne du tourisme et le Ministère du tourisme du Québec. http://www.air-journal.fr/2011-11-04-air-transat-fait-sa-promo-dans-les-cinemas-538790.html

How Skyscrapers Can Save the City BESIDES MAKING CITIES MORE AFFORDABLE AND ARCHITECTURALLY INTERESTING, TALL BUILDINGS ARE GREENER THAN SPRAWL, AND THEY FOSTER SOCIAL CAPITAL AND CREATIVITY. YET SOME URBAN PLANNERS AND PRESERVATIONISTS SEEM TO HAVE A MISPLACED FEAR OF HEIGHTS THAT YIELDS DAMAGING RESTRICTIONS ON HOW TALL A BUILDING CAN BE. FROM NEW YORK TO PARIS TO MUMBAI, THERE’S A POWERFUL CASE FOR BUILDING UP, NOT OUT. By Edward Glaeser IMAGE CREDIT: LEONELLO CALVETTI/BERNSTEIN & ANDRIULLI IN THE BOOK of Genesis, the builders of Babel declared, “Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. And let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered upon the face of the whole earth.” These early developers correctly understood that cities could connect humanity. But God punished them for monumentalizing terrestrial, rather than celestial, glory. For more than 2,000 years, Western city builders took this story’s warning to heart, and the tallest structures they erected were typically church spires. In the late Middle Ages, the wool-making center of Bruges became one of the first places where a secular structure, a 354-foot belfry built to celebrate cloth-making, towered over nearby churches. But elsewhere another four or five centuries passed before secular structures surpassed religious ones. With its 281-foot spire, Trinity Church was the tallest building in New York City until 1890. Perhaps that year, when Trinity’s spire was eclipsed by a skyscraper built to house Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, should be seen as the true start of the irreligious 20th century. At almost the same time, Paris celebrated its growing wealth by erecting the 1,000-foot Eiffel Tower, which was 700 feet taller than the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. Also see: Interactive Graphic: How High Can We Go? The ceaseless climb of the world's skyscrapers is a story of ever-evolving challenges. Here's how we reached the heights we have—and where we might go from here. Since that tower in Babel, height has been seen both as a symbol of power and as a way to provide more space on a fixed amount of land. The belfry of Trinity Church and Gustave Eiffel’s tower did not provide usable space. They were massive monuments to God and to French engineering, respectively. Pulitzer’s World Building was certainly a monument to Pulitzer, but it was also a relatively practical means of getting his growing news operation into a single building. For centuries, ever taller buildings have made it possible to cram more and more people onto an acre of land. Yet until the 19th century, the move upward was a moderate evolution, in which two-story buildings were gradually replaced by four- and six-story buildings. Until the 19th century, heights were restricted by the cost of building and the limits on our desire to climb stairs. Church spires and belfry towers could pierce the heavens, but only because they were narrow and few people other than the occasional bell-ringer had to climb them. Tall buildings became possible in the 19th century, when American innovators solved the twin problems of safely moving people up and down and creating tall buildings without enormously thick lower walls. Elisha Otis didn’t invent the elevator; Archimedes is believed to have built one 2,200 years ago. And Louis XV is said to have had a personal lift installed in Versailles so that he could visit his mistress. But before the elevator could become mass transit, it needed a good source of power, and it needed to be safe. Matthew Boulton and James Watt provided the early steam engines used to power industrial elevators, which were either pulled up by ropes or pushed up hydraulically. As engines improved, so did the speed and power of elevators that could haul coal out of mines or grain from boats. But humans were still wary of traveling long distances upward in a machine that could easily break and send them hurtling downward. Otis, tinkering in a sawmill in Yonkers, took the danger out of vertical transit. He invented a safety brake and presented it in 1854 at New York’s Crystal Palace Exposition. He had himself hoisted on a platform, and then, dramatically, an axman severed the suspending rope. The platform dropped slightly, then came to a halt as the safety brake engaged. The Otis elevator became a sensation. In the 1870s, it enabled pathbreaking structures, like Richard Morris Hunt’s Tribune Building in New York, to reach 10 stories. Across the Atlantic, London’s 269-foot St. Pancras Station was taller even than the Tribune Building. But the fortress-like appearance of St. Pancras hints at the building’s core problem. It lacks the critical cost-reducing ingredient of the modern skyscraper: a load-bearing steel skeleton. Traditional buildings, like St. Pancras or the Tribune Building, needed extremely strong lower walls to support their weight. The higher a building went, the thicker its lower walls had to be, and that made costs almost prohibitive, unless you were building a really narrow spire. The load-bearing steel skeleton, which pretty much defines a skyscraper, applies the same engineering principles used in balloon-frame houses, which reduced the costs of building throughout rural 19th-century America. A balloon-frame house uses a light skeleton made of standardized boards to support its weight. The walls are essentially hung on the frame like a curtain. Skyscrapers also rest their weight on a skeleton frame, but in this case the frame is made of steel, which became increasingly affordable in the late 19th century. THERE IS A lively architectural debate about who invented the skyscraper—reflecting the fact that the skyscraper, like most other gifts of the city, didn’t occur in a social vacuum, and did not occur all at once. William Le Baron Jenney’s 138-foot Home Insurance Building, built in Chicago in 1885, is often seen as the first true skyscraper. But Jenney’s skyscraper didn’t have a complete steel skeleton. It just had two iron-reinforced walls. Other tall buildings in Chicago, such as the Montauk Building, designed by Daniel Burnham and John Root and built two years earlier, had already used steel reinforcement. Industrial structures, like the McCullough Shot and Lead Tower in New York and the St. Ouen dock warehouse near Paris, had used iron frames decades before. Jenney’s proto-skyscraper was a patchwork, stitching together his own innovations with ideas that were in the air in Chicago, a city rich with architects. Other builders, like Burnham and Root, their engineer George Fuller, and Louis Sullivan, a former Jenney apprentice, then further developed the idea. Sullivan’s great breakthrough came in 1891, when he put up the Wainwright Building in St. Louis, a skyscraper free from excessive ornamental masonry. Whereas Jenney’s buildings evoke the Victorian era, the Wainwright Building points the way toward the modernist towers that now define so many urban skylines. Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead is believed to be loosely based on the early life of Sullivan’s apprentice Frank Lloyd Wright. Sullivan and Wright are depicted as lone eagles, Gary Cooper heroes, paragons of individualism. They weren’t. They were great architects deeply enmeshed in an urban chain of innovation. Wright riffed on Sullivan’s idea of form following function, Sullivan riffed on Jenney, and they all borrowed the wisdom of Peter B. Wight, who produced great innovations in fireproofing. Their collective creation—the skyscraper—enabled cities to add vast amounts of floor space using the same amount of ground area. Given the rising demand for center-city real estate, the skyscraper seemed like a godsend. The problem was that those city centers already had buildings on them. Except in places like Chicago, where fire had created a tabula rasa, cities needed to tear down to build up. The demand for space was even stronger in New York than in Chicago, and skyscrapers were soon springing up in Manhattan. In 1890, Pulitzer’s World Building had some steel framing, but its weight was still supported by seven-foot-thick masonry walls. In 1899, the Park Row Building soared over the World Building, to 391 feet, supported by a steel skeleton. Daniel Burnham traveled east to build his iconic Flatiron Building in 1902, and several years later, Wight’s National Academy of Design was torn down to make way for the 700-foot Metropolitan Life tower, then the tallest building in the world. In 1913, the Woolworth Building reached 792 feet, and it remained the world’s tallest until the boom of the late ’20s. IMAGE CREDIT: GIANLUCA FABRIZIO/GETTY IMAGES THOSE TALL BUILDINGS were not mere monuments. They enabled New York to grow and industries to expand. They gave factory owners and workers space that was both more humane and more efficient. Manhattan’s master builders, such as A. E. Lefcourt, made that possible. Like a proper Horatio Alger figure, Lefcourt was born poor and started work as a newsboy and bootblack. By his teenage years, he had saved enough cash to buy a $1,000 U.S. Treasury bond, which he kept pinned inside his shirt. At 25, Lefcourt took over his employer’s wholesale business, and over the next decade he became a leading figure in the garment industry. In 1910, Lefcourt began a new career as a real-estate developer, putting all of his capital into a 12-story loft building on West 25th Street for his own company. He built more such buildings, and helped move his industry from the old sweatshops into the modern Garment District. The advantage of the garment industry’s old home downtown had been its proximity to the port. Lefcourt’s new Garment District lay between Grand Central and Pennsylvania stations, anchored by the rail lines that continued to give New York a transportation advantage. Transportation technologies shape cities, and Midtown Manhattan was built around two great rail stations that could carry in legions of people. Also see: City Limits: A Conversation With Edward Glaeser The author comments on preserving Paris, the hazards of housing projects, and why measures aimed at saving our cities may actually threaten their survival. Over the next 20 years, Lefcourt would erect more than 30 edifices, many of them skyscrapers. He used those Otis elevators in soaring towers that covered 150 acres, encased 100 million cubic feet, and contained as many workers as Trenton. “He demolished more historical landmarks in New York City than any other man had dared to contemplate,” TheWall Street Journal wrote. In the early 1920s, the New York of slums, tenements, and Gilded Age mansions was transformed into a city of skyscrapers, as builders like Lefcourt erected nearly 100,000 new housing units each year, enabling the city to grow and to stay reasonably affordable. By 1928, Lefcourt’s real-estate wealth had made him a billionaire in today’s dollars. He celebrated by opening a national bank bearing his own name. Lefcourt’s optimism was undiminished by the stock-market crash, and he planned $50 million of construction for 1930, sure that it would be a “great building year.” But as New York’s economy collapsed, so did his real-estate empire, which was sold off piecemeal to pay his investors. He died in 1932 worth only $2,500, seemingly punished, like the builders of Babel, for his hubris. I suspect that Lefcourt, like many developers, cared more about his structural legacy than about cash. Those structures helped house the creative minds that still make New York special. His most famous building, which doesn’t even bear his name, came to symbolize an entire musical style: the “Brill Building Sound.” In the late 1950s and early ’60s, artists connected in the Brill Building, producing a string of hits like “Twist and Shout,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” and, fittingly enough, “Up on the Roof.” Cities are ultimately about the connections between people, and structures—like those built by Lefcourt—make those connections possible. By building up, Lefcourt made the lives of garment workers far more pleasant and created new spaces for creative minds. NEW YORK’S UPWARD trajectory was not without its detractors. In 1913, the distinguished chairman of the Fifth Avenue Commission, who was himself an architect, led a fight to “save Fifth Avenue from ruin.” At that time, Fifth Avenue was still a street of stately mansions owned by Carnegies and Rockefellers. The anti-growth activists argued that unless heights were restricted to 125 feet or less, Fifth Avenue would become a canyon, with ruinous results for property values and the city as a whole. Similar arguments have been made by the enemies of change throughout history. The chair of the commission was a better architect than prognosticator, as density has suited Fifth Avenue quite nicely. Also see: Gallery: The Architecture of Louis Sullivan Historic photographs of some of Louis Sullivan's most renowned and intriguing buildings. The Atlantic on Skyscrapers and Cities Writings by Robert Moses, Richard Florida, Witold Rybczynski, Philip Langdon, and others, from the Atlantic's archives. In 1915, between Broadway and Nassau Street, in the heart of downtown New York, the Equitable Life Assurance Society constructed a monolith that contained well over a million square feet of office space and, at about 540 feet, cast a seven-acre shadow on the city. The building became a rallying cry for the enemies of height, who wanted to see a little more sun. A political alliance came together and passed the city’s landmark 1916 zoning ordinance, which allowed buildings to rise only if they gave up girth. New York’s many ziggurat-like structures, which get narrower as they get taller, were constructed to fulfill the setback requirements of that ordinance. The code changed the shape of buildings, but it did little to stop the construction boom of the 1920s. Really tall buildings provide something of an index of irrational exuberance. Five of the 10 tallest buildings standing in New York City in 2009—including the Empire State Building—were completed between 1930 and ’33. In the go-go years of the late ’20s, when the city’s potential seemed unlimited, builders like Lefcourt were confident they could attract tenants, and their bankers were happy to lend. The builders of the Chrysler Building, 40 Wall Street, and the Empire State Building engaged in a great race to produce the tallest structure in the world. It is an odd fact that two of New York’s tallest and most iconic edifices were built with money made from selling the cars that would move America away from vertical cities to sprawling suburbs. As it turned out, the winner, the Empire State Building, was soon nicknamed the “Empty State Building”—it was neither fully occupied nor profitable until the 1940s. Luckily for its financiers, the building’s construction had come in way below budget. New York slowed its construction of skyscrapers after 1933, and its regulations became ever more complex. Between 1916 and 1960, the city’s original zoning code was amended more than 2,500 times. In 1961, the City Planning Commission passed a new zoning resolution that significantly increased the limits on building. The resulting 420-page code replaced a simple classification of space—business, residential, unrestricted—with a dizzying number of different districts, each of which permitted only a narrow range of activities. There were 13 types of residential district, 12 types of manufacturing district, and no fewer than 41 types of commercial district. Each type of district narrowly classified the range of permissible activities. Commercial art galleries were forbidden in residential districts but allowed in manufacturing districts, while noncommercial art galleries were forbidden in manufacturing districts but allowed in residential districts. Art-supply stores were forbidden in residential districts and some commercial districts. Parking-space requirements also differed by district. In an R5 district, a hospital was required to have one off-street parking spot for every five beds, but in an R6 district, a hospital had to have one space for every eight beds. The picayune detail of the code is exemplified by its control of signs: For multiple dwellings, including apartment hotels, or for permitted non-residential buildings or other structures, one identification sign, with an area not exceeding 12 square feet and indicating only the name of the permitted use, the name or address of the building, or the name of the management thereof, is permitted. The code also removed the system of setbacks and replaced it with a complex system based on the floor-to-area ratio, or FAR, which is the ratio of interior square footage to ground area. A maximum FAR of two, for example, meant that a developer could put a two-story building on his entire plot or a four-story building on half of the plot. In residential districts R1, R2, and R3, the maximum floor-to-area ratio was 0.5. In R9 districts, the maximum FAR was about 7.5, depending on the building height. The height restriction was eased for builders who created plazas or other public spaces at the front of the building. While the standard building created by the 1916 code was a wedding cake that started at the sidewalk, the standard building created by the 1961 code was a glass-and-steel slab with an open plaza in front. NEW YORK’S ZONING CODES were getting more rigorous, but so were other restrictions on development. After World War II, New York made private development more difficult by overregulating construction and rents, while building a bevy of immense public structures, such as Stuyvesant Town and Lincoln Center. But then, during the 1950s and ’60s, both public and private projects ran into growing resistance from grassroots organizers like Jane Jacobs, who were becoming adept at mounting opposition to large-scale development. In 1961, Jacobs published her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which investigates and celebrates the pedestrian world of mid-20th-century New York. She argued that mixed-use zoning fostered street life, the essence of city living. But Jacobs liked protecting old buildings because of a confused piece of economic reasoning. She thought that preserving older, shorter structures would somehow keep prices affordable for budding entrepreneurs. That’s not how supply and demand works. Protecting an older one-story building instead of replacing it with a 40-story building does not preserve affordability. Indeed, opposing new building is the surest way to make a popular area unaffordable. An increase in the supply of houses, or anything else, almost always drives prices down, while restricting the supply of real estate keeps prices high. The relationship between housing supply and affordability isn’t just a matter of economic theory. A great deal of evidence links the supply of space with the cost of real estate. Simply put, the places that are expensive don’t build a lot, and the places that build a lot aren’t expensive. Perhaps a new 40-story building won’t itself house any quirky, less profitable firms, but by providing new space, the building will ease pressure on the rest of the city. Price increases in gentrifying older areas will be muted because of new construction. Growth, not height restrictions and a fixed building stock, keeps space affordable and ensures that poorer people and less profitable firms can stay and help a thriving city remain successful and diverse. Height restrictions do increase light, and preservation does protect history, but we shouldn’t pretend that these benefits come without a cost. IMAGE CREDIT: RAEFORD DWYER IN 1962, IN response to the outcry over the razing of the original Pennsylvania Station, which was beautiful and much beloved, Mayor Robert Wagner established the Landmarks Preservation Commission. In 1965, despite vigorous opposition from the real-estate industry, the commission became permanent. Initially, this seemed like a small sop to preservationists. The number of buildings landmarked in the commission’s first year, 1,634, was modest, and the commission’s power was checked by the city council, which could veto its decisions. Yet, like entropy, the reach of governmental agencies often expands over time, so that a mild, almost symbolic group can come to influence vast swaths of a city. By 2008, more than 15 percent of Manhattan’s non-park land south of 96th Street was in a historic district, where every external change must be approved by the commission. By the end of 2010, the commission had jurisdiction over 27,000 landmarked buildings and 101 historic districts. In 2006, the developer Aby Rosen proposed putting a glass tower of more than 20 stories atop the old Sotheby Parke-Bernet building at 980 Madison Avenue, in the Upper East Side Historic District. Rosen and his Pritzker Prize–winning architect, Lord Norman Foster, wanted to erect the tower above the original building, much as the MetLife Building (formerly the Pan Am Building) rises above Grand Central Terminal. The building was not itself landmarked, but well-connected neighbors didn’t like the idea of more height, and they complained to the commission. Tom Wolfe, who has written brilliantly about the caprices of both New York City and the real-estate industry, wrote a 3,500-word op-ed in The New York Times warning the landmarks commission against approving the project. Wolfe & Company won. In response to his critics in the 980 Madison Avenue case, of whom I was one, Wolfe was quoted in The Village Voice as saying: To take [Glaeser’s] theory to its logical conclusion would be to develop Central Park … When you consider the thousands and thousands of people who could be housed in Central Park if they would only allow them to build it up, boy, the problem is on the way to being solved! But one of the advantages of building up in already dense neighborhoods is that you don’t have to build in green areas, whether in Central Park or somewhere far from an urban center. From the preservationist perspective, building up in one area reduces the pressure to take down other, older buildings. One could quite plausibly argue that if members of the landmarks commission have decided that a building can be razed, then they should demand that its replacement be as tall as possible. The cost of restricting development is that protected areas have become more expensive and more exclusive. In 2000, people who lived in historic districts in Manhattan were on average almost 74 percent wealthier than people who lived outside such areas. Almost three-quarters of the adults living in historic districts had college degrees, as opposed to 54 percent outside them. People living in historic districts were 20 percent more likely to be white. The well-heeled historic-district denizens who persuade the landmarks commission to prohibit taller structures have become the urban equivalent of those restrictive suburbanites who want to mandate five-acre lot sizes to keep out the riffraff. It’s not that poorer people could ever afford 980 Madison Avenue, but restricting new supply anywhere makes it more difficult for the city to accommodate demand, and that pushes up prices everywhere. Again, the basic economics of housing prices are pretty simple—supply and demand. New York and Mumbai and London all face increasing demand for their housing, but how that demand affects prices depends on supply. Building enough homes eases the impact of rising demand and makes cities more affordable. That’s the lesson of both Houston today and New York in the 1920s. In the post-war boom years between 1955 and 1964, Manhattan issued permits for an average of more than 11,000 new housing units each year. Between 1980 and ’99, when the city’s prices were soaring, Manhattan approved an average of 3,100 new units per year. Fewer new homes meant higher prices; between 1970 and 2000, the median price of a Manhattan housing unit increased by 284 percent in constant dollars. The other key factor in housing economics is the cost of building a home. The cheapest way to deliver new housing is in the form of mass-produced two-story homes, which typically cost only about $84 a square foot to erect. That low cost explains why Atlanta and Dallas and Houston are able to supply so much new housing at low prices, and why so many Americans have ended up buying affordable homes in those places. Building up is more costly, especially when elevators start getting involved. And erecting a skyscraper in New York City involves additional costs (site preparation, legal fees, a fancy architect) that can push the price even higher. But many of these are fixed costs that don’t increase with the height of the building. In fact, once you’ve reached the seventh floor or so, building up has its own economic logic, since those fixed costs can be spread over more apartments. Just as the cost of a big factory can be covered by a sufficiently large production run, the cost of site preparation and a hotshot architect can be covered by building up. The actual marginal cost of adding an extra square foot of living space at the top of a skyscraper in New York is typically less than $400. Prices do rise substantially in ultra-tall buildings—say, over 50 stories—but for ordinary skyscrapers, it doesn’t cost more than $500,000 to put up a nice 1,200-square-foot apartment. The land costs something, but in a 40-story building with one 1,200-square-foot unit per floor, each unit is using only 30 square feet of Manhattan—less than a thousandth of an acre. At those heights, the land costs become pretty small. If there were no restrictions on new construction, then prices would eventually come down to somewhere near construction costs, about $500,000 for a new apartment. That’s a lot more than the $210,000 that it costs to put up a 2,500-square-foot house in Houston—but a lot less than the $1 million or more that such an apartment often costs in Manhattan. Land is also pretty limited in Chicago’s Gold Coast, on the shores of Lake Michigan. Demand may not be the same as in Manhattan, but it’s still pretty high. Yet you can buy a beautiful condominium with a lake view for roughly half the cost of a similar unit in Manhattan. Building in Chicago is cheaper than in New York—but it’s not twice as cheap. The big cost difference is that Chicago’s leadership has always encouraged new construction more than New York’s (at least before the Bloomberg administration). The forest of cranes along Lake Michigan keeps Chicago affordable. Most people who fight to stop a new development think of themselves as heroes, not villains. After all, a plan to put up a new building on Madison Avenue clearly bugs a lot of people, and preventing one building isn’t going to make much difference to the city as a whole. The problem is that all those independent decisions to prohibit construction add up. Zoning rules, air rights, height restrictions, and landmarks boards together form a web of regulation that has made building more and more difficult. The increasing wave of regulations was, until the Bloomberg administration, making New York shorter. In a sample of condominium buildings, I found that more than 80 percent of Manhattan’s residential buildings built in the 1970s had more than 20 stories. But less than 40 percent of the buildings put up in the 1990s were that tall. The elevator and the steel-framed skyscraper made it possible to get vast amounts of living space onto tiny amounts of land, but New York’s building rules were limiting that potential. The growth in housing supply determines not only prices but the number of people in a city. The statistical relationship between new building and population growth within a given area is almost perfect, so that when an area increases its housing stock by 1 percent, its population rises by almost exactly that proportion. As a result, when New York or Boston or Paris restricts construction, its population will be smaller. If the restrictions become strong enough, then a city can even lose population, despite rising demand, as wealthier, smaller families replace poorer, larger ones. Jane Jacobs’s insights into the pleasures and strengths of older, shorter urban neighborhoods were certainly correct, but she had too little faith in the strengths of even-higher density levels. I was born a year before Jacobs left New York for Toronto, and I lived in Manhattan for the next 17 years. Yet my neighborhood looked nothing like low-rise Greenwich Village. I grew up surrounded by white glazed towers built after World War II to provide affordable housing for middle-income people like my parents. The neighborhood may not have been as charming as Greenwich Village, but it had plenty of fun restaurants, quirky stores, and even-quirkier pedestrians. The streets were reasonably safe. It was certainly a functioning, vibrant urban space, albeit one with plenty of skyscrapers. WHEN BARON HAUSSMANN thoroughly rebuilt Paris in the mid-19th century at the behest of Napoleon III, he did things unthinkable in a more democratic age: He evicted vast numbers of the poor, turning their homes into the wide boulevards that made Paris monumental. He lopped off a good chunk of the Luxembourg Gardens to create city streets. He tore down ancient landmarks, including much of the Île de la Cité. He spent 2.5 billion francs on his efforts, which was 44 times the total budget of Paris in 1851. All of that spending and upheaval turned Paris from an ancient and somewhat dilapidated city of great poverty into an urban resort for the growing haute bourgeoisie. He also made Paris a bit taller, boosting the Bourbon-era height limit on buildings from 54 feet to 62 feet. Still, relative to cities built in the elevator-rich 20th century, Haussmann’s Paris stayed short, because people needed to climb stairs. Height restrictions were lifted in 1967, and construction of Paris’s first proper skyscraper, the 689-foot Montparnasse Tower, didn’t begin until 1969. Two years later, Les Halles, a popular open-air marketplace, was wiped away and the futuristic Centre Pompidou museum was begun. But these changes rankled those Parisians who had gotten used to a static city. The Montparnasse Tower was widely loathed, and the lesson drawn was that skyscrapers must never again mar central Paris. Les Halles was sorely missed, in much the same way that many New Yorkers mourned the demise of the old Penn Station. France is a far more regulatory country than America, and when its rulers decide they don’t want change, change will not occur. In 1974, a height limit of 83 feet was imposed in central Paris. But while these rules restricted height in old Paris, they let buildings grow on the periphery. Today, the majority of Paris’s skyscrapers are in relatively dense but far-flung complexes like La Défense, which is three miles northwest of the Arc de Triomphe. La Défense is as vertical as central Paris is flat. It has about 35 million square feet of commercial space and the feel of an American office park. Except for the distant view of the Arc, administrative assistants drinking lattes in a Starbucks there could easily be in a bigger version of Crystal City, Virginia. La Défense addresses the need to balance preservation and growth by segregating skyscrapers. In some senses, it is an inspired solution. People working there can still get to old Paris in about 20 minutes by Métro or in an hour on foot. That Métro line means that businesses in La Défense can connect with the all-important French bureaucracy that remains centered in the old city. La Défense is one of Europe’s most concentrated commercial centers, and it seems to have all of the economic excitement that we would expect from such a mass of skilled workers. The sector enables Paris to grow, while keeping the old city pristine. But building in La Défense is not a perfect substitute for new construction in the more-desirable central areas of Paris, where short supply keeps housing prices astronomical. The natural thing is to have tall buildings in the center, where demand is greatest, not on the edge. The lack of new housing in central Paris means that small apartments can sell for $1 million or more. Hotel rooms often cost more than $500 a night. If you want to be in the center of the city, you’ll have to pay for it. People are willing to pay those high prices, because Paris is so charming, but they wouldn’t have to if the city’s rulers hadn’t decided to limit the amount of housing that can be built in the area. Average people are barred from living in central Paris just as surely as if the city had put up a gate and said that no middle-income people can enter. For the world’s oldest, most beautiful cities, La Défense provides a viable model. Keep the core areas historic, but let millions of square feet be built nearby. As long as building in the high-rise district is sufficiently unfettered, then that area provides a safety valve for the region as a whole. The key issue with La Défense is whether it is too far away. Its distance from the old city keeps central Paris pristine, but it deprives too many people of the pleasures of strolling to a traditional café for lunch. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to balance the benefits of providing additional desirable space with the need to preserve a beautiful older city. I wish that some developments like La Défense had been built closer to the center of Paris. But I also understand those who think Paris is so precious that more space should be maintained between the developments and Haussmann’s boulevards. Paris, however, is an extreme case. In much of the rest of the world, the argument for restricting development is far weaker. And nowhere have limits on development done more harm than in the Indian mega-city of Mumbai. IT’S A PITY that so few ordinary people can afford to live in central Paris or Manhattan, but France and the U.S. will survive. The problems caused by arbitrarily restricting height in the developing world are far more serious, because they handicap the metropolises that help turn desperately poor nations into middle-income countries. The rules that keep India’s cities too short and too expensive mean that too few Indians can connect, with each other and with the outside world, in the urban places that are making that poor country richer. Since poverty often means death in the developing world, and since restricting city growth ensures more poverty, it is not hyperbole to say that land-use planning in India can be a matter of life and death. Mumbai is a city of astonishing human energy and entrepreneurship, from the high reaches of finance and film to the jam-packed spaces of the Dharavi slum. All of this private talent deserves a public sector that performs the core tasks of city government—like providing sewers and safe water—without overreaching and overregulating. One curse of the developing world is that governments take on too much and fail at their main responsibilities. A country that cannot provide clean water for its citizens should not be in the business of regulating film dialogue. The public failures in Mumbai are as obvious as the private successes. Western tourists can avoid the open-air defecation in Mumbai’s slums, but they can’t avoid the city’s failed transportation network. Driving the 15 miles from the airport to the city’s old downtown, with its landmark Gateway of India arch, can easily take 90 minutes. There is a train that could speed your trip, but few Westerners have the courage to brave its crowds during rush hour. In 2008, more than three people each working day were pushed out of that train to their death. Average commute times in Mumbai are roughly 50 minutes each way, which is about double the average American commute. The most cost-effective means of opening up overcrowded city streets would be to follow Singapore and charge more for their use. If you give something away free, people will use too much of it. Mumbai’s roads are just too valuable to be clogged up by ox carts at rush hour, and the easiest way to get flexible drivers off the road is to charge them for their use of public space. Congestion charges aren’t just for rich cities; they are appropriate anywhere traffic comes to a standstill. After all, Singapore was not wealthy in 1975, when it started charging drivers for using downtown streets. Like Singapore, Mumbai could just require people to buy paper day licenses to drive downtown, and require them to show those licenses in their windows. Politics, however, and not technology, would make this strategy difficult. Mumbai’s traffic problems reflect not just poor transportation policy, but a deeper and more fundamental failure of urban planning. In 1991, Mumbai fixed a maximum floor-to-area ratio of 1.33 in most of the city, meaning that it restricted the height of the average building to 1.33 stories: if you have an acre of land, you can construct a two-story building on two-thirds of an acre, or a three-story building on four-ninths of an acre, provided you leave the rest of the property empty. In those years, India still had a lingering enthusiasm for regulation, and limiting building heights seemed to offer a way to limit urban growth. But Mumbai’s height restrictions meant that, in one of the most densely populated places on Earth, buildings could have an average height of only one and a third stories. People still came; Mumbai’s economic energy drew them in, even when living conditions were awful. Limiting heights didn’t stop urban growth, it just ensured that more and more migrants would squeeze into squalid, illegal slums rather than occupying legal apartment buildings. Singapore doesn’t prevent the construction of tall buildings, and its downtown functions well because it’s tall and connected. Businesspeople work close to one another and can easily trot to a meeting. Hong Kong is even more vertical and even friendlier to pedestrians, who can walk in air-conditioned skywalks from skyscraper to skyscraper. It takes only a few minutes to get around Wall Street or Midtown Manhattan. Even vast Tokyo can be traversed largely on foot. These great cities function because their height enables a huge number of people to work, and sometimes live, on a tiny sliver of land. But Mumbai is short, so everyone sits in traffic and pays dearly for space. A city of 20 million people occupying a tiny landmass could be housed in corridors of skyscrapers. An abundance of close and connected vertical real estate would decrease the pressure on roads, ease the connections that are the lifeblood of a 21st-century city, and reduce Mumbai’s extraordinarily high cost of space. Yet instead of encouraging compact development, Mumbai is pushing people out. Only six buildings in Mumbai rise above 490 feet, and three of them were built last year, with more on the way as some of the height restrictions have been slightly eased, especially outside the traditional downtown. But the continuing power of these requirements explains why many of the new skyscrapers are surrounded by substantial green space. This traps tall buildings in splendid isolation, so that cars, rather than feet, are still needed to get around. If Mumbai wants to promote affordability and ease congestion, it should make developers use their land area to the fullest, requiring any new downtown building to have at least 40 stories. By requiring developers to create more, not less, floor space, the government would encourage more housing, less sprawl, and lower prices. Historically, Mumbai’s residents couldn’t afford such height, but many can today, and they would live in taller buildings if those buildings were abundant and affordable. Concrete canyons, such as those along New York’s Fifth Avenue, aren’t an urban problem—they are a perfectly reasonable way to fit a large number of people and businesses on a small amount of land. Only bad policy prevents a long row of 50-story buildings from lining Mumbai’s seafront, much as high-rises adorn Chicago’s lakefront. The magic of cities comes from their people, but those people must be well served by the bricks and mortar that surround them. Cities need roads and buildings that enable people to live well and to connect easily with one another. Tall towers, like Henry Ford II’s Renaissance Center in Detroit, make little sense in places with abundant space and slack demand. But in the most desirable cities, whether they’re on the Hudson River or the Arabian Sea, height is the best way to keep prices affordable and living standards high. THE SUCCESS OF our cities, the world’s economic engines, increasingly depends on abstruse decisions made by zoning boards and preservation committees. It certainly makes sense to control construction in dense urban spaces, but I would replace the maze of regulations now limiting new construction with three simple rules. Also see: The 30 Most Dynamic Cities in the World Grading each metropolis by the growth of its income and employment, a new study found the world's fastest recovering cities are overwhelmingly in three key areas: China and India, Southeast Asian islands, and Latin America The 20 Cities Leading the U.S. Recovery Areas that traded the boom-and-bust real estate business for Meds, Eds, Feds and Enlisteds only got spritzed by the recession while most cities felt the full force of the economic tsunami. First, cities should replace the lengthy and uncertain permitting processes now in place with a simple system of fees. If tall buildings create costs by blocking out light or views, then form a reasonable estimate of those costs and charge the builder appropriately. The money from those fees could then be given to the people who are suffering, such as the neighbors who lose light from a new construction project. I don’t mean to suggest that such a system would be easy to design. There is plenty of room for debate about the costs associated with buildings of different heights. People would certainly disagree about the size of the neighboring areas that should receive compensation. But reasonable rules could be developed that would then be universally applied; for instance, every new building in New York would pay some amount per square foot in compensation costs, in exchange for a speedy permit. Some share of the money could go to the city treasury, and the rest would go to people within a block of the new edifice. A simple tax system would be far more transparent and targeted than the current regulatory maze. Today, many builders negotiate our system by hiring expensive lawyers and lobbyists and buying political influence. It would be far better for them to just write a check to the rest of us. Allowing more building doesn’t have to be a windfall for developers; sensible, straightforward regulations can make new development good for the neighborhood and the city. Second, historic preservation should be limited and well defined. Landmarking a masterpiece like the Flatiron Building or the old Penn Station is sensible. Preserving a post-war glazed-brick building is absurd. But where do you draw the line between those two extremes? My own preference is that, in a city like New York, the Landmarks Preservation Commission should have a fixed number of buildings, perhaps 5,000, that it may protect. The commission can change its chosen architectural gems, but it needs to do so slowly. It shouldn’t be able to change its rules overnight to stop construction in some previously unprotected area. If the commission wants to preserve a whole district, then let it spread its 5,000-building mandate across the area. Perhaps 5,000 buildings are too few; but without some sort of limit, any regulatory agency will constantly try to increase its scope. The problem gets thornier in places like Paris, practically all of which is beloved worldwide. In such cases, the key is to find some sizable area, reasonably close to the city center, that can be used for ultra-dense development. Ideally, this space would be near enough to let its residents enjoy walking to the beautiful streets of the older city. Finally, individual neighborhoods should have more power to protect their special character. Some blocks might want to exclude bars. Others might want to encourage them. Rather than regulate neighborhoods entirely from the top down, let individual neighborhoods enforce their own, limited rules that are adopted only with the approval of a large share of residents. In this way, ordinary citizens, rather than the planners in City Hall, would get a say over what happens around them. Great cities are not static—they constantly change, and they take the world along with them. When New York and Chicago and Paris experienced great spurts of creativity and growth, they reshaped themselves to provide new structures that could house new talent and new ideas. Cities can’t force change with new buildings—as the Rust Belt’s experience clearly shows. But if change is already happening, new building can speed the process along. Yet many of the world’s old and new cities have increasingly arrayed rules that prevent construction that would accommodate higher densities. Sometimes these rules have a good justification, such as preserving truly important works of architecture. Sometimes, they are mindless NIMBYism or a misguided attempt at stopping urban growth. In all cases, restricting construction ties cities to their past and limits the possibilities for their future. If cities can’t build up, then they will build out. If building in a city is frozen, then growth will happen somewhere else. Land-use regulations may seem like urban arcana. But these rules matter because they shape our structures, and our structures shape our societies—often in unexpected ways. Consider that carbon emissions are significantly lower in big cities than in outlying suburbs, and that, as of 2007, life expectancy in New York City was 1.5 years higher than in the nation as a whole. As America struggles to regain its economic footing, we would do well to remember that dense cities are also far more productive than suburbs, and offer better-paying jobs. Globalization and new technologies seem to have only made urban proximity more valuable—young workers gain many of the skills they need in a competitive global marketplace by watching the people around them. Those tall buildings enable the human interactions that are at the heart of economic innovation, and of progress itself. This article available online at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/8387/ Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/8387/

Since everyone here loves Maclean's http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/10/14/the-good-bad-and-ugly/ What the hell is going on in BC? (and secondarily, Alberta, Red Deer? Seriously?!) I liked one of the comments:

Un monorail pourrait réapparaître sur l'île Sainte-Hélène d'ici quelques années, comme au temps de l'Expo 67. Un projet estimé à 185 millions de dollars a été présenté jeudi dernier devant la Commission des finances du Conseil municipal et la Commission d'agglomération sur les finances, à l'Hôtel de Ville de Montréal. Le monorail circulerait sur une dizaine de kilomètres entre les principaux sites d'activités du parc Jean-Drapeau, de l'île Notre-Dame et la Place Bonaventure au centre-ville de Montréal. Ce moyen de transport est donc à l'étude, et recueille déjà des avis favorables. Le directeur général Christian Ouellet en a notamment parlé avec enthousiasme. La Société du parc Jean-Drapeau propose de réaliser plusieurs autres projets en prévision du 375e anniversaire de Montréal, en 2017. On annonçait également lundi matin la venue d'un nouveau président au conseil d'administration de la Société du parc Jean-Drapeau : Normand Legault. D'après un reportage de Benoît Chapdelaine http://www.radio-canada.ca/regions/Montreal/2010/10/04/006-monorail.shtml J'aimerais bien voir ça un jour! Mais disons que j'aimerais mieux voir un SLR jusqu'à longueil avant!

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2010/07/new-york-cabbies-love-old-ford-crown-victoria-not-hybrids/1?csp=34

Quebec vows to fight national securities plan RHEAL SEGUIN Globe and Mail Update September 18, 2008 at 4:11 PM EDT For the second consecutive day, the Quebec government waded into the federal election campaign against Conservative policies, lashing-out today at the Harper government's proposal to create a national securities commission. Quebec Finance Minister Monique Jérôme-Forget warned that in the event of a majority Conservative government in Ottawa bent on creating a national securities commission, all provinces and territories except Ontario will fight the decision right-up to the Supreme Court of Canada. The confrontation, she predicted, would disrupt markets and create havoc for investors. “The protection of investors is a provincial jurisdiction,” she said. “I suspect they (a Harper government) are going to come-up with legislation. They are going to implement such a securities commission. We are going to appeal. We're going to go as high as the Supreme Court. There's going to be disruption in the market.” The Minister added that Canada's financial leaders underestimate the impact if Ottawa moves to unilaterally impose changes without provincial consent. Ontario remained the only province to support the federal initiative. All the others propose to harmonize regulations through what they call a “passport” system, where companies can file a prospectus for approval in one province or territory and have it automatically accepted by all the others. There are currently 13 provincial and territorial securities commission. She predicts that a national securities commission will only create another layer of bureaucracy by adding a 14th commission, creating confusion for investors. “People won't know where to go. The market will want to know who's in charge. There will be a court challenge right up to the Supreme Court because the provinces argue is their jurisdiction,” Ms. Jérôme-Forget said. “Quebec isn't alone. You have British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, the Atlantic provinces. They are all on side.” Improvements to the current system are needed, she added, such as finding ways to accommodate restrictions imposed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In the past, that has created obstacles for prosecutors who want to use confidential information held by regulator bodies in pursuing criminal cases such as fraud. “We don't want to change the Charter but we have to find ways to share the information,” she said. Backed by two international studies, the Minister argued that Canada's current securities regulations are among the best in the world and that there was no need to change the system. The comments came at the conclusion of a federal-provincial meeting of ministers responsible for their respective securities commissions. Her charge against the Harper government's intrusion in a provincial jurisdiction comes on the heels of severe criticism by Quebec this week against other Conservative policies. On Wednesday, Cultural and Communications Minister Christine St-Pierre scoffed at federal Heritage Minister Josée Verner's suggestion that if Quebec wanted more funding for culture it should use its own money. “We've increased budgets (for culture) by 25 per cent. We're already doing our share,” Ms. St-Pierre said in referring to the $45-million in federal cutback in programs including those aimed at promoting Canadian and Quebec culture abroad. The cutbacks sparked widespread criticism from Quebec's cultural community including world renowned theatre artist Robert Lepage, who said the Harper government was discouraging home grown artists from seeking prominence abroad by locking them into a “cultural prison.” Ms. Jérôme-Forget also challenged the Conservative party's claim that it has fixed the fiscal imbalance between Ottawa and the provinces, especially after signing a multi-billion agreement for infrastructure projects. “Obviously for me it's not enough. Post-education (money) for all provinces has not been settled. ” Ms Jérôme-Forget said. “There was a great move done by Mr. Harper….but for post secondary education there is still room to manoeuvre.” Despite mounting tensions over a growing number of issues, the Quebec government stopped short of calling Mr. Harper's vision of open federalism a failure. “The objective of federalism isn't to say: ‘If I don't get everything, I'll slam the door.' You have to build alliances and on occasion force your position and try to influence others. It's normal to have differences,” she said.

http://montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20100505/mtl_building_100505/20100505/?hub=MontrealHome Surprise surprise.

Le BAPE En créant le Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement en décembre 1978 par l’adoption de la Loi modifiant la Loi sur la qualité de l’environnement, l’Assemblée nationale du Québec affirmait le droit des citoyens à l’information et à la consultation. Elle reconnaissait officiellement la valeur et la pertinence de la contribution de la population québécoise à l’évaluation environnementale. Plus encore, elle permettait aux Québécois de contribuer à la décision du gouvernement d’autoriser ou non la réalisation d’un projet susceptible d’avoir des répercussions majeures sur leur environnement. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Le Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement, aussi appelé le BAPE, est un organisme de consultation publique. C’est, pour les citoyens, un outil privilégié d’information et d’expression sur les projets susceptibles d’avoir des conséquences sur la qualité de vie de leur milieu. Afin d’assurer l’indépendance et la neutralité de ses commissions, les membres du BAPE sont assermentés et souscrivent à un code de déontologie rigoureux et à des valeurs éthiques reposant sur l’équité, l’impartialité, le respect et la vigilance. Bien que les commissions du BAPE privilégient une approche consensuelle, elles peuvent utiliser, le cas échéant, leurs pouvoirs quasi judiciaires afin d’assurer au public l’accès aux documents requis pour l’examen d’un projet. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Véritable outil d’aide à la décision du gouvernement, le BAPE fournit au ministre du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et des Parcs un rapport contenant, entre autres, le point de vue et les suggestions des citoyens, des municipalités, des groupes et des organismes. C’est en s’appuyant sur les résultats de la consultation publique menée par le BAPE et sur l’analyse environnementale effectuée par le ministère du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et des Parcs que le ministre fait une recommandation au Conseil des ministres à qui revient la décision finale d’autoriser ou non le projet et sous quelles conditions. Pour effectuer son enquête, réaliser son analyse et faire rapport, le BAPE consulte la population dans le but d’identifier les attentes du milieu, et de cerner les enjeux liés à un projet. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Le BAPE et le ministère du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et des Parcs relèvent tous deux du ministre du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et des Parcs. Cependant, ce sont des entités différentes, indépendantes l’une de l’autre et donc, complètement autonomes. Les mandats du BAPE La procédure d’évaluation et d’examen des impacts sur l’environnement, à laquelle sont assujettis les projets ayant des répercussions majeures sur l’environnement, prévoit une étape de participation du public. Cette phase est cruciale ! Avant que le projet ne soit autorisé, la population est informée et invitée à prendre position quant à l’acceptabilité du projet. C’est là qu’intervient le BAPE, et ce, par un mandat qu’il reçoit du ministre du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et des Parcs. Dans le cadre de la procédure, le BAPE reçoit d’abord un mandat d’information et de consultation du dossier par le public et, si demande lui en est faite, le ministre du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et des Parcs peut donner au BAPE un mandat d’audience publique. Le ministre peut aussi demander au BAPE de faire enquête ou, dans certains cas, de procéder à une médiation. La période d'information et de consultation du dossier par le public Lorsque le ministre du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et des Parcs demande au BAPE de rendre publiques l’étude d’impact et la documentation liée à un projet, celui-ci met en œuvre une série de moyens pour en informer la population. La documentation est rendue disponible dans le centre de documentation situé au bureau du BAPE, à Québec et, dans celui de la bibliothèque de l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Ces documents sont aussi accessibles dans le site Web du BAPE. Des centres de consultation sont également ouverts dans les milieux concernés. Les personnes intéressées par un projet à l’étude peuvent inscrire leurs commentaires dans un registre disponible dans les centres de consultation. Pendant cette période, le BAPE tient une séance d’information dans le territoire concerné par le projet. Cette séance se déroule avec la participation du promoteur. Elle permet à la population de se renseigner sur le projet à l’étude. C’est aussi l’occasion de connaître la procédure d’évaluation et d’examen des impacts sur l’environnement, le rôle du BAPE et celui du citoyen. C’est au cours de la période d’information et de consultation du dossier par le public qu’une personne, un groupe, un organisme ou une municipalité peut demander par écrit au ministre du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et des Parcs la tenue d’une audience publique, s’il désire que le projet fasse l’objet d’un examen public. Deux éléments essentiels doivent apparaître dans la demande d’audience publique. D’abord les motifs de la demande, c’est-à-dire les raisons qui la justifient. Ensuite, l’intérêt par rapport au milieu, c’est-à-dire en quoi la personne, la municipalité, le groupe ou l’organisme qui fait la demande d’audience se sent concerné par le projet. Cette demande doit être transmise au ministre du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et des Parcs, au plus tard le dernier jour de la période d’information et de consultation du dossier par le public. À la fin de la période réglementaire de 45 jours, un compte rendu factuel sur le déroulement de la période d’information et de consultation du dossier par le public est transmis au ministre. L’enquête et l'audience publique Lorsque le BAPE reçoit du ministre un mandat d’enquête et d’audience publique, le président du BAPE procède à la formation de la commission d'enquête et désigne la personne qui en assurera la présidence. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- L’audience se déroule en deux parties : la première est consacrée à la recherche d’information sur tous les aspects et les enjeux du projet ; la deuxième permet l’expression des opinions de la population. Au début de la première partie, la commission d'enquête entend les requérants pour leur permettre d’expliquer les motifs de leur demande. Le promoteur présente ensuite son projet et les répercussions environnementales qu’il prévoit. Puis, le promoteur et les personnes-ressources invitées par la commission répondent aux questions de la population et de la commission. Le but est de cerner tous les aspects du projet et d’obtenir l’information la plus complète et la plus compréhensible possible. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Au terme de cette première partie d’audience, les personnes qui souhaitent exprimer leur opinion sur le projet disposent d’au moins 21 jours pour préparer un mémoire ou une présentation orale. Elles peuvent alors consulter la documentation disponible. Au cours de la deuxième partie de l’audience, la commission d'enquête entend les opinions des personnes, des municipalités, des groupes et des organismes ayant déposé un mémoire ou souhaitant faire une présentation orale. Une fois la partie publique terminée, la commission entreprend l’analyse du projet avec son équipe. Pour ce faire, elle utilise les transcriptions de l’audience, les documents déposés, les mémoires et les présentations des participants à l’audience, ainsi que ses propres recherches, ce qui conduit à la rédaction du rapport. Celui-ci fait état des points de vue exprimés en audience et contient les constatations de la commission et l’analyse qu’elle en a faite. Au terme du mandat d’une durée maximale de 4 mois, le président du BAPE transmet le rapport au ministre. Par la suite, le ministre dispose de 60 jours pour rendre le rapport public. Le rôle du citoyen La participation de la population est essentielle ! Pour jouer son rôle, le citoyen peut d’abord s'informer. Il peut consulter les documents sur le projet et l’ensemble du dossier dans les centres de documentation du BAPE, les centres de consultation ouverts sur le territoire concerné par le projet et dans le site Web. Il peut aussi participer à la séance d’information du BAPE. Toute personne, groupe, organisme ou municipalité peut demander au ministre du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et des Parcs la tenue d’une audience publique et ainsi permettre l’examen public d’un projet. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Parce qu'il connaît bien son milieu, le citoyen peut identifier les problèmes potentiels liés à un projet et suggérer des solutions qui permettront de l’améliorer. Le citoyen peut exprimer ses préoccupations devant la commission d'enquête du BAPE chargée de tenir une audience publique. Le citoyen peut aussi prendre position sur le projet et se prononcer sur l’acceptabilité de celui-ci. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- En s'informant, en exprimant ses préoccupations et en se prononçant sur un projet, le citoyen permet d’en améliorer la qualité et ainsi, assurer le développement durable et harmonieux de son milieu. http://www.bape.gouv.qc.ca/index.htm

Vers une seule commission canadienne... Mise à jour le lundi 12 janvier 2009 à 8 h 19 Les marchés financiers canadiens sont régis par 13 agences provinciales et territoriales, mais un seul organisme national pourrait bientôt prendre le relais. Selon le quotidien The Globe and Mail, des experts recommandent au ministre des Finances Jim Flaherty de créer une seule commission des valeurs mobilières au Canada. Tom Hockin, le président du Groupe d'experts sur la réglementation des valeurs mobilières, publiera et expliquera ses conclusions lundi après-midi, à Vancouver. Le Groupe d'experts a été mis sur pied par le ministre Flaherty il y a près d'un an. Le mandat des experts est de proposer des mesures pour améliorer la réglementation des valeurs mobilières au Canada. Au mois de novembre, le gouvernement minoritaire du conservateur Stephen Harper réaffirmait son intention de s'engager dans la voie d'une seule commission, tout en laissant aux provinces opposées au projet la possibilité de s'y soustraire. Le Québec et l'Alberta font partie des opposants tandis que l'Ontario défend depuis longtemps l'idée d'un organisme unique. Le Globe and Mail rapporte que les experts proposeront au ministre Flaherty de suggérer aux provinces d'adhérer volontairement à la nouvelle instance nationale. Si elles refusent, le ministre aura la possibilité d'offrir aux entreprises d'adhérer à la réglementation nationale. Le fédéral pourrait aussi contester devant les tribunaux l'entêtement des provinces à maintenir en force leur réglementation sur les valeurs mobilières. Les conclusions du Groupe risquent fort d'irriter certaines provinces qui tiennent à leurs pouvoirs en matière réglementaire. La ministre des Finances du Québec Monique Jérôme-Forget croit qu'en tentant d'enlever ce pouvoir aux provinces à la faveur d'une seule commission des valeurs mobilières au Canada, le gouvernement Harper remettrait en question le fédéralisme d'ouverture qu'il prône depuis son arrivée au pouvoir. Le premier ministre Stephen Harper a convoqué ses homologues des provinces et territoires à une rencontre le 16 janvier, à Ottawa. La réglementation des marchés financiers fait partie de l'ordre du jour des discussions, tout comme l'accélération des investissements en infrastructure, l'élimination des barrières au commerce interprovincial et le développement des communautés autochtones. Tom Hockin est un ancien ministre d'État aux Finances et ex-président de l'Institut des fonds d'investissement du Canada. Parmi les six autres membres du Groupe figure Denis Desautels, ancien vérificateur général du Canada.

Publié le 16 juillet 2009 à 06h35 | Mis à jour à 06h37 Montréal serait affaibli La Presse Doris Juergens Que faut-il penser de la création d'une commission fédérale des valeurs mobilières? Jusqu'ici, le débat a surtout porté sur la bataille juridique que Québec s'apprête à livrer à Ottawa afin de contester la compétence de l'État central en matière de valeurs mobilières. Or, ce dossier comporte aussi un enjeu important pour Montréal, et c'est celui de l'avenir de son industrie des services professionnels reliés à ce secteur. Au cours des derniers mois, nous avons consulté un groupe de 25 gens d'affaires montréalais provenant de cabinets d'avocats, de firmes de comptables, de grandes entreprises et de regroupements d'affaires. Les répondants ont accepté de nous parler avec l'assurance que leur identité et leurs propos demeureraient confidentiels. Le sujet nous intéressait parce que nous offrons nous-mêmes des services-conseils en communication aux entreprises et organismes dans le secteur financier, y compris l'Autorité des marchés financiers. Informée de notre projet, cette dernière nous a exprimé son intérêt pour notre initiative et nous a procuré un soutien financier pour élargir la portée de cette recherche, que nous avons complétée en toute objectivité. Les résultats de cette recherche qualitative démontrent que la création d'une commission fédérale des valeurs mobilières affaiblirait encore davantage la place de Montréal comme centre financier. Pour Montréal, cela se traduirait par une diminution d'influence, une perte d'expertise, en plus de ternir son image. La majorité des personnes interrogées, surtout les avocats, se disent peu ou pas du tout favorables à la création d'une commission fédérale et craignent un affaiblissement des compétences professionnelles dans le secteur des valeurs mobilières à Montréal. On appréhende particulièrement une perte d'influence et un exode de cerveaux au bénéfice de Toronto, où l'on s'attend que sera établie la Commission fédérale. Nécessité non démontrée À peu près tous les intervenants, peu importe leur secteur, estiment que cette commission ne contribuera pas à mieux protéger les investisseurs. À ce sujet, tous déplorent le peu de succès du gouvernement fédéral en matière d'enquêtes criminelles liées aux valeurs mobilières. Les leaders interrogés sont très majoritairement d'avis que le système de passeport est suffisamment efficace et ne voient pas la nécessité de créer une commission fédérale. Ils croient même que cette question ne se poserait plus si l'Ontario acceptait d'adhérer au système de passeport. De plus, ils ne sont pas convaincus que les bénéfices annoncés se réaliseront et ils estiment que le gouvernement fédéral n'a pas fait la preuve de la nécessité d'un tel organisme. Parmi les répondants, les grands émetteurs sont presque les seuls à être plus favorables à la création d'une commission fédérale, dans l'espoir d'une plus grande efficacité. Beaucoup appréhendent aussi la disparition de la proximité avec l'organisme et le fait de ne plus voir les expertises et les spécificités locales reflétées au sein d'une commission fédérale. Ces expertises - et donc des professionnels hautement qualifiés - migreraient vers la commission fédérale, privant ainsi les régions de leur savoir-faire. Les répondants estiment également que les PME québécoises seraient affectées. On voit difficilement comment les petits émetteurs trouveraient leur compte avec une commission fédérale à Toronto. La question de la langue a été soulevée par plusieurs intervenants qui s'inquiètent du glissement vers l'anglais et de la perte éventuelle d'une expertise chez les professionnels capables de travailler dans les deux langues. Mais certains font valoir qu'un organisme fédéral aura des obligations liées à la Loi sur les langues officielles que n'ont pas les organismes provinciaux. Actuellement, seuls les « prospectus « d'un émetteur qui vise le marché du Québec doivent être traduits en français. Il nous intéressait de savoir comment les autres firmes de services et les entreprises voyaient l'instauration d'une commission fédérale des valeurs mobilières. Nous savons maintenant que certains pensent que c'est une bataille que Montréal devrait livrer, car il en va de l'avenir de l'industrie des services reliés aux valeurs mobilières au Québec. Plusieurs avocats croient qu'il s'agit d'une juridiction partagée entre les deux paliers de gouvernement et, étant donné l'issue incertaine d'une démarche en Cour suprême, ils pensent que Québec devrait négocier avec le fédéral pour préserver le maximum d'acquis pour Montréal. L'auteure est associée et directrice de la recherche au Cabinet de relations publiques NATIONAL

Québec va contester le projet de commission unique des valeurs mobilières Publié le 08 juillet 2009 à 11h36 | Mis à jour à 13h05 Martin Vallières La Presse (Montréal) «Le système actuel fonctionne. Le Québec entend affirmer sa compétence en matière de valeurs mobilières et c'est pas vrai qu'on va laisser migrer ça à Toronto», a indiqué le ministre des finances du Québec, Raymond Bachand, en conférence de presse, ce matin a Montréal. Le 6 février dernier, le gouvernement du Canada avait présenté à la Chambre des communes le projet de loi C-10 portant sur la création d'une commission pancanadienne. Le projet a été adopté le 12 mars. Le gouvernement québécois affirme n'avoir d'autre choix que de prendre la voie de la contestation judiciaire et d'obtenir l'opinion de la Cour d'appel sur ces questions constitutionnelles. À son avis, le projet fédéral met en péril la compétence législative et les instances administratives du Québec. Le gouvernement québécois pense, d'autre part, que la crise financière a récemment démontré que, contrairement à ce qu'affirme le ministre fédéral des Finances, Jim Flaherty, la réglementation des valeurs mobilières s'avère plus efficace lorsqu'elle est effectuée par des organismes non centralisés. Good move Québec, fight them up !

Valeurs mobilières: Ottawa prépare une commission nationale Publié le 22 juin 2009 à 16h09 | Mis à jour le 22 juin 2009 à 18h33 La Presse Canadienne Ottawa Le gouvernement fédéral a fait un pas de plus vers la création d'un organisme national de réglementation des marchés financiers en annonçant lundi la mise sur pied d'un bureau de transition dont le mandat sera de coordonner le projet avec les provinces et avec l'industrie. Ce bureau sera présidé par l'ancien président de la Commission des valeurs mobilières de la Colombie-Britannique, Doug Hyndman. Il sera secondé par le Torontois Bryan Davies, qui occupe depuis 2006 le poste de président du conseil de la Société d'assurance-dépôt du Canada. Le ministre des Finances Jim Flaherty a assuré que l'adhésion au futur organisme de réglementation serait volontaire et que le Québec - qui s'y est toujours opposé - pourrait choisir de rester à l'écart. Il ne perd cependant pas espoir de voir un jour la Belle Province rentrer dans le rang. «Nous ne claquons la porte au nez de personne. Je rêve du jour où nous aurons un organisme de régulation vraiment national», a-t-il insisté lors d'un point de presse à Ottawa. Pour le ministre, la création d'une commission nationale contribuera à la consolidation de l'État canadien. Il a toutefois insisté lundi pour dire qu'il faudrait respecter les expertises et les spécificités régionales tout au long du processus. Le gouvernement du Québec n'a cependant pas semblé rassuré par ces propos. Le grand argentier de la province, Raymond Bachand, craint que le projet de régulateur national crée de l'incertitude sur les marchés à un bien mauvais moment. «La dernière chose dont on a besoin c'est un débat de structures. Moi j'ai besoin que mes autorités de valeurs mobilières et les commissions des autres provinces concentrent 100 pour cent de leur énergie sur la réglementation, la surveillance des marchés et faciliter la reprise économique», a-t-il martelé. Le ministre Bachand a ajouté que, s'il le fallait, Québec pourrait se tourner vers les tribunaux pour faire valoir son point de vue et défendre son Autorité des marchés financiers. L'annonce de Jim Flaherty n'a pas non plus été bien accueillie par les partis d'opposition à Ottawa. Pour le Bloc québécois et le Nouveau Parti démocratique, la création du bureau est une manoeuvre de plus pour faire pression sur les «provinces récalcitrantes». «C'est de la provocation», a résumé le leader parlementaire du Bloc québécois, Pierre Paquette, en entrevue à La Presse Canadienne. «On n'est pas dupes du tout. Le caractère volontaire, c'est tout simplement pour s'assurer d'isoler le Québec et d'éventuellement le forcer à intégrer cette commission-là», a-t-il ajouté. De son côté, le chef-adjoint du Nouveau Parti démocratique, Thomas Mulcair, reproche à Ottawa d'empiéter encore une fois dans un champ de compétence exclusive des provinces. Les deux hommes se sont par ailleurs dits «outrés» que le ministre Flaherty ait attendu que les travaux parlementaires soient suspendus pour faire son annonce. «Il n'a même pas eu le courage de soulever le débat pendant que la Chambre siégeait encore. Il a attendu le premier jour où la Chambre ne siège plus», a souligné M. Mulcair, qui est le seul député néo-démocrate du Québec. Le projet d'un organisme national est cher aux yeux des conservateurs et particulièrement du ministre Flaherty, qui en a fait l'une de ses priorités depuis son arrivée en poste en 2006. L'industrie des services financiers, très largement basée à Toronto, en a aussi fait l'un de ses chevaux de bataille depuis quelques années. Les libéraux, qui ont longtemps été favorables à l'idée d'un organisme pancanadien de régulation des marchés, ont récemment indiqué qu'ils avaient désormais des doutes et qu'ils préféreraient demander à la Cour suprême de se pencher sur la constitutionnalité du projet avant de se prononcer. Actuellement, chaque province et territoire est responsable du commerce des valeurs mobilières à l'intérieur de ses frontières. Plus de 85 pour cent des inscriptions et des transactions réglementées sont toutefois sous la juridiction de la Commission des valeurs mobilières de l'Ontario.

California Cities Face Bankruptcy Curbs By BOBBY WHITE MAY 28, 2009 As California seeks more funds from its cash-strapped cities and counties to close a $21 billion budget deficit, some state legislators are pushing a plan that could compound municipalities' pain by making it tougher for them to file for bankruptcy. The bill would require a California municipality seeking Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection to first obtain approval from a state commission. That contrasts with the state's current bankruptcy process, which allows municipalities to speedily declare bankruptcy without any state oversight so that they can quickly restructure their finances. The bill, introduced in January, has passed one committee vote and could reach a final vote by mid-July. The bill was sparked by the bankruptcy filing last year of Vallejo, Calif., just north of San Francisco. Vallejo's city leaders partly blamed work contracts with police and firefighters for pushing the city into bankruptcy, and won permission from a bankruptcy court in March to scrap its contract with the firefighters' union. That spurred the California Professional Firefighters to push for statewide legislation to curtail bankruptcy, said Carroll Willis, the group's communications director. "What we don't want is for cities to use bankruptcy as a negotiating tactic rather than a legit response to fiscal issues," he said, adding that he worries cities may work in concert to rid themselves of union contracts by declaring bankruptcy. If the bill passes, it could hurt cities and counties by lengthening the time before they can declare bankruptcy. That creates a legal limbo during which a municipality is more vulnerable to creditors. The proposed state bankruptcy commission would be staffed by four state legislators, which some critics worry could politicize the bankruptcy process. "This bill is impractical," said John Moorlach, a supervisor in Orange County, Calif., which filed for bankruptcy in 1994. "In many instances, haste is important. If you can't meet payroll but have to delay seeking protection, what do you do?" California towns and counties face a catalog of troubles. Earlier this month, voters rejected five budget measures, sending the state deficit to $21 billion. To overcome the gap, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed borrowing $2 billion from municipalities, using a 2004 state law that lets California demand loans of 8% of property-tax revenue from cities, counties and special districts. But that proposal lands as California municipalities are already facing steep declines in tax revenue because of the recession. Dozens are staring at huge deficits, including Pacific Grove and Stockton, which have publicly said they are exploring bankruptcy. Assemblyman Tony Mendoza, a Democrat who introduced the bankruptcy bill, said the initiative is needed to protect the credit rating of California and its ability to borrow and sell bonds. Mr. Mendoza added that he wants to avoid bankruptcy's repercussions on surrounding communities by offering a system that examines all of a municipality's options before filing for bankruptcy. "Municipalities should have a checks and balance system in place based on the fact that all economies are interconnected," he said. Dwight Stenbakken, deputy executive director for the California League of Cities, a nonprofit representing more than 400 cities, said the group is lobbying against the bill because "there's nothing a state commission can bring to the process to make this better." Write to Bobby White at bobby.white@wsj.com

More Quebecers see immigrants as threat: poll By Marian Scott, The GazetteMay 22, 2009 6:59 Protesters demonstrate outside Palais des congrès during the Bouchard-Taylor hearings on reasonable accommodation in November 2007. Protesters demonstrate outside Palais des congrès during the Bouchard-Taylor hearings on reasonable accommodation in November 2007. Photograph by: John Kenney, Gazette file photo One year after a provincial report on the accommodation of cultural minorities, a majority of Quebecers still say newcomers should give up their cultural traditions and become more like everybody else, according to a new poll. Quebecers’ attitudes toward immigrants have hardened slightly since 2007, when the Bouchard-Taylor commission started hearings across Quebec on the “reasonable accommodation” of cultural communities. The survey by Léger Marketing for the Association for Canadian Studies found that 40 per cent of francophones view non-Christian immigrants as a threat to Quebec society, compared with 32 per cent in 2007. Thirty-two per cent of non-francophones said non-Christian immigrants threaten Quebec society, compared with 34 per cent in 2007. “If you look at opinions at the start of the Bouchard-Taylor commission and 18 months later, basically, they haven’t changed,” said Jack Jedwab, executive director of the non-profit research institute. “If the hearings were designed to change attitudes, that has not occurred,” he added. Headed by sociologist Gérard Bouchard and philosopher Charles Taylor, the $3.7-million commission held hearings across Quebec on how far society should go to accommodate religious and cultural minorities. It received 900 briefs and heard from 3,423 participants in 22 regional forums. Its report, made public one year ago Friday, made 37 recommendations, including abolishing prayers at municipal council meetings; increasing funding for community organizations that work with immigrants and initiatives to promote tolerance; providing language interpreters in health care; encouraging employers to allow time off for religious holidays; studying how to hire more minorities in the public service; and attracting immigrants to remote regions. Rachad Antonius, a professor of sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal, said it’s no surprise the commission failed to change Quebecers’ attitudes toward minorities. “Focusing on cultural differences is the wrong approach,” Antonius said. Cultural communities need to achieve economic equality by having access to education, social services and job opportunities, he said. “If there is greater economic integration, that is what is going to change things,” he said. The poll reveals persistent differences between younger and older Quebecers and between francophones and non-francophones on cultural and religious diversity. For example, 56 per cent of respondents age 18 to 24 said Muslim girls should be allowed to wear hijabs in public schools, while only 30 per cent of those 55 and over approved of head scarves in school. Sixty-three per cent of non-francophones said head scarves should be permitted in school compared with 32 per cent of French-speaking respondents. Only 25 per cent of francophones said Quebec society should try harder to accept minority groups’ customs and traditions while 74 per cent of non-francophones said it should make more of an effort to do so. The poll also found Quebecers split on an ethics and religion course introduced last year in schools across the province. A coalition of parents and Loyola High School, a private Catholic institution, are challenging the nondenominational course, which they say infringes parents’ rights to instill religious values in their children. Half of francophones said the course was a good thing while 78 per cent of non-francophones gave it a thumbs up. When asked their opinion of different religious groups, 88 per cent of French-speakers viewed Catholics favourably, 60 per cent viewed Jews favourably – down 12 percentage points from 2007 – and 40 per cent had a favourable opinion of Muslims (compared with 57 per cent in 2007). Among non-francophones, 92 per cent viewed Catholics with favour, 77 per cent had a positive opinion of Jews and 65 a good opinion of Muslims. A national poll published this month by Maclean’s Magazine also revealed that many Canadians are biased against religious minorities, particularly in Quebec. The survey by Angus Reid Strategies reported that 68 per cent of Quebecers view Islam negatively while 52 per cent of Canadians as a whole have a low opinion of the religion. It found that 36 per cent of Quebecers view Judaism unfavourably, compared with 59 per cent of Ontarians. The Léger Marketing survey of 1,003 Quebecers was conducted by online questionnaire May 13-16. Results are considered accurate within 3.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. mascot@thegazette.canwest.com © Copyright © The Montreal Gazette

May 22, 2009 By IAN AUSTEN OTTAWA — Arthur Erickson, who was widely viewed as Canada’s pre-eminent Modernist architect, died in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Wednesday. He was 84. Phyllis Lambert, the chairwoman of the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, said Mr. Erickson, a friend, had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Mr. Erickson established an international reputation for designing innovative complexes and buildings, often to critical acclaim. Among them are the San Diego Convention Center; Napp Laboratories in Cambridge, England; the Kuwait Oil Sector Complex in Kuwait City; and Kunlun Apartment Hotel Development in Beijing. He designed the Canadian pavilion, an inverted pyramid, at Expo 67, the world’s fair in Montreal; Canada’s embassy in Washington; and, with the firm of Mathers and Haldenby, the Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto’s main concert hall, a circular, futuristic building that tapers to a flat top. But Mr. Erickson is perhaps best known for providing Vancouver, his hometown, with many of its architectural signatures, the most successful of which he integrated with their surrounding landscapes, avoiding ornamentation and favoring concrete (which he called “the marble of our time”). Among his notable buildings there is the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. “His work always came out of the earth,” Ms. Lambert said. “He didn’t start the way most architects started. He actually started off with the earth, the landscape, and made something that inhabited the land.” Mr. Erickson also campaigned for buildings that strove to maintain a human scale. In 1972 he persuaded the province of British Columbia to abandon plans for a 55-story office and court complex in downtown Vancouver. Mr. Erickson’s replacement design effectively turned the tower on its side. He created a relatively low, three-block-long complex with a steel and glass truss roof and a complex concrete structure softened with trees, gardens and waterfalls. It was another Vancouver commission, however, that first brought Mr. Erickson fame. Much to his surprise, he and his architectural partner at the time, Geoffrey Massey, won a competition in 1965 to design the campus of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver. Its wide, low buildings mirror the mountains surrounding the city. Arthur Charles Erickson was born on June 14, 1924. His parents were influential promoters of the arts in Vancouver as the city began to grow rapidly in the early 20th century, and they encouraged Arthur and his brother to study the arts. Prominent Canadian artists in Vancouver became Mr. Erickson’s mentors, notably the landscape painter Lawren S. Harris. After serving with the Canadian Army in Asia as a commando and intelligence officer during World War II, Mr. Erickson began his university studies with the hope of becoming a diplomat. But in his autobiography, “The Architecture of Arthur Erickson,” he wrote that he changed his mind in 1947 after seeing, in Fortune magazine, photographs of Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Modernist and environmentally sensitive house built in the desert in Scottsdale, Ariz. “Suddenly, it was clear to me,” Mr. Erickson wrote. “If such a magical realm was the province of an architect, I would become one.” He moved to Montreal to study architecture at McGill University. After his success with the Simon Fraser commission, Mr. Erickson was awarded other prestigious projects, including the Canadian Expo pavilion. That work raised his public profile, and Mr. Erickson used it to promote environmentalism and corporate responsibility. Mr. Erickson’s commission to design a new embassy in Washington generated some controversy when Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, a friend, awarded it to Mr. Erickson without any public process. The building, which opened in 1989, is on Pennsylvania Avenue, near the Capitol. Paul Goldberger, the chief architecture critic of The New York Times at the time, called it one of Mr. Erickson’s less-successful works. Over the years Mr. Erickson’s firm — today it is called the Arthur Erickson Corporation — opened branches in Toronto, Los Angeles, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Information about his survivors was not available. Il étudie à Montréal, mais aucune oeuvre ici? In 1992, Mr. Erickson, millions of dollars in debt, was forced to declare bankruptcy. But he continued to practice, producing work like the Museum of Glass, in Tacoma, Wash. He also continued to champion Modernism and decried a postmodern trend that emphasized ornamentation and decoration. “After 1980, you never heard reference to space again,” he said in a speech at McGill in 2000. “Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design,” and, he added, “space the essence of architectural expression at its highest level, disappeared.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/arts/22erickson.html?scp=1&sq=montreal&st=cse

États-Unis - Pourquoi la crise? AFP Édition du mercredi 06 mai 2009 Washington -- La Chambre des représentants se penche aujourd'hui sur la création d'une commission d'enquête sur les déboires économiques Les sénateurs ont déjà approuvé la création d'une commission parlementaire pour examiner les causes de la crise économique. La Chambre des représentants américaine devrait approuver aujourd'hui un projet de loi visant à créer une commission d'enquête indépendante pour examiner les causes de la crise économique, sur le modèle de celle instaurée après les attentats du 11 septembre 2001. Après le Sénat fin avril, la Chambre se prononcera sur le projet aujourd'hui, a-t-on appris hier au bureau du représentant républicain Darrell Issa, qui a introduit le texte à la chambre basse. Le texte devrait être soutenu par de nombreux parlementaires de tous bords. La présidente démocrate de la Chambre, Nancy Pelosi, a déjà fait part de son soutien. «Alors que le Congrès et l'administration s'emploient à répondre à la crise financière, il est judicieux de mettre en place une commission indépendante pour savoir ce qui a échoué et pourquoi», écrit M. Issa dans un communiqué. Le projet prévoit que la commission indépendante sera composée de 10 membres choisis parmi des «citoyens ayant une expérience dans les domaines de la banque, la régulation des marchés, la fiscalité, la finance et le logement». Les témoins qu'elle fera citer ne pourront pas s'y soustraire, aucun parlementaire ni membre de l'administration ne pourra y siéger et elle devra rendre sa copie au président et au Congrès le 15 décembre 2010. «Le but de cette commission n'est pas de désigner des coupables, mais plutôt d'identifier les erreurs de façon à ce que les efforts pour faire redémarrer l'économie et éviter une nouvelle crise ne soient pas vains», précise M. Issa. Le Sénat avait approuvé le texte le 22 avril sous la forme d'un amendement à une loi contre la fraude dans le système financier. Les sénateurs ont également approuvé le même jour la création d'une commission parlementaire ayant une mission semblable. L'idée a été lancée par le républicain John McCain, candidat malheureux à la présidentielle de novembre, et son collègue démocrate Byron Dorgan. Interrogé sur cette commission, le chef de la majorité démocrate de la chambre basse, Steny Hoyer, a répondu hier qu'elle servirait à «voir comment [la crise] s'est déroulée, pourquoi et quelles sont les démarches que nous devons entreprendre pour éviter que cela ne recommence». «Je pense qu'il y un consensus sur cette commission même si tout n'a pas été finalisé», a-t-il ajouté.

Publié le 05 mai 2009 à 00h13 | Mis à jour à 00h17 Québec doit mettre Montréal en tutelle, estime Louise O'Sullivan Catherine Handfield La Presse Louise O'Sullivan, ancienne conseillère municipale et candidate à la mairie de Montréal, a demandé à Québec lundi de mettre en tutelle l'administration du maire Gérald Tremblay jusqu'aux élections du 1er novembre. «Vous n'avez d'autres alternatives que d'imposer la tutelle (...) et de mandater la Commission municipale du Québec pour superviser dorénavant toutes les décisions du comité exécutif et des divers arrondissements», a écrit Mme O'Sullivan dans une lettre adressée à la ministre des Affaires municipales, Nathalie Normandeau. Louise O'Sullivan, qui a quitté l'équipe du maire Tremblay en 2005 et qui a fondé son propre parti ce printemps, demande également de convoquer Gérald Tremblay et ses lieutenants à une commission parlementaire pour faire la lumière sur les controverses qui ont ébranlé la Ville ces derniers mois. «Devant la tournure de plus en plus malsaine que prend chaque jour la saga des scandales entourant l'administration de la Ville de Montréal, je me vois dans l'obligation de vos réécrire pour vous demander d'agir de façon urgente et sévère pour rétablir le climat de confiance envers les actions de nos élus municipaux», écrit-elle. L'ex-conseillère estime que le chef de l'opposition officielle, Benoît Labonté, et le chef de Projet Montréal, Richard Bergeron, ont failli à leur tâche. «Tous les élus ont voté en faveur de projets douteux de l'administration sortante et ce n'est qu'après le travail d'enquête de certains journalistes, particulièrement du quotidien La Presse, que l'opposition a commencé à poser des questions», poursuit-elle. Au cours des derniers mois, les médias ont mis au jour les séjours de l'ancien président du comité exécutif de Montréal, Frank Zampino, sur le yacht de l'homme d'affaires Tony Accurso, alors que la Ville s'apprêtait à octroyer le contrat des compteurs d'eau. Un autre controverse entoure la gestion du projet Contrecoeur par la SHDM, un dossier qui a incité le vérificateur général à recommander la tenue d'une enquête policière.

Le discours de l'ancien patron de la Caisse, Henri-Paul Rousseau, n'a pas répondu à toutes les questions selon le Parti québécois, qui réclame toujours la tenue d'une commission parlementaire. Pour en lire plus...

Québec maintient être en faveur d'une commission de deux jours pour étudier la gestion de la Caisse. Le PQ exige que sa mission soit aussi à l'ordre du jour et que la ministre des Finances vienne témoigner. Pour en lire plus...