swansongtoo

47 minutes ago, Djentmaster001 said:

28 employees 

We need a yawn emoji. 

3 hours ago, bob said:

Avec la hauteur du pont à cet endroit, c'était l'occasion de pousser beaucoup plus en hauteur à ses abords immédiats: cela aurait amélioré l'effet d'échelle sans endommager le ressenti au niveau de la rue (déjà très impacté par la présence du pont). Une occasion manquée tant qu'à moi.

Une parmi tent d’autres avec cette administration. 

OK.  On espère que l’immeuble CAA disparaît avec le prochain boom 2025 - 2035. 

La pose de fenêtre est bien commencée.  Photo à l’instant.  
 

 

50 minutes ago, samuelmath said:

Oui, et c'est pour ça qu'on va bientôt ouvrir le REM ce printemps, que le SRB Pie-IX est déjà en fonction et que la ligne bleue est présentement en construction...

Tu es modérateur sur ce forum? Sérieux?

C’est du sarcasme …  

Article du GnM 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-montreal-downtown-economic-recovery-covid/

The lifeblood of Montreal’s downtown core used to be office workers. Now, they’re missing

Foot traffic downtown has largely returned to pre-pandemic levels, but the number of professionals returning to the office remains small

NICOLAS VAN PRAET

MONTREAL

PUBLISHED YESTERDAY

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Michel Leblanc, head of the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, in downtown Montreal on Nov. 17.CHRISTINNE MUSCHI/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

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For the past two years, Michel Leblanc was the guy in the tie trying to save downtown Montreal from pandemic-induced ruin – a fate the city centre avoided. Now comes the hard part: reviving its office culture.

Mr. Leblanc is president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal, a business group with outsized influence and a rich history of accomplishments. In its early days, merchant members organized the dredging of the St. Lawrence River so Montreal’s port could accommodate bigger ships. Later on, they pitched the creation of what is now the internationally renowned business school, École des Hautes Études Commerciales.

So when the Quebec government opened its purse strings in March, 2021, to try to stimulate an economic recovery in Montreal’s financial centre after successive COVID-19 waves and work-from-home mandates, the Chamber of Commerce was a logical recipient of public funds. The group was handed $14.5-million to finance the effort, second only to the City of Montreal’s $22-million.

The things Mr. Leblanc has done with the money range from predictable to imaginative, from polling business people on their intentions to organizing eye-catching, street-level art installations. But for the city centre’s white-collar professionals, work from home has become entrenched – often with the blessing of their employers. And dislodging that is proving harder than anyone might have imagined.

“Although the entire economy of the metropolitan area has found its way back to normal, our downtown area still seems to be suffering from a kind of long COVID,” Mr. Leblanc told political and business leaders gathered last week for a forum on the health of the city centre.

Quebec had more severe lockdowns than elsewhere in North America and that continues to have a lasting psychological impact on workers, Mr. Leblanc said in a recent interview. At the same time, many companies as well as government departments are hesitant to impose mandatory in-person attendance for their staff amid a tight labour market. The result is that, on any given day, only about half of the city centre’s estimated 300,000 white-collar workers are coming into the office.

Mr. Leblanc has been particularly critical of the federal government for what he calls its inertia and lack of leadership in bringing its staff back to the office, which has left big buildings in the downtown core largely empty.

“They are not in tune with the rest of the economy, the rest of the decision makers, they are much slower,” he said, referring to the federal bureaucrats making these decisions.

In general, he said, there are differences of opinion between workers and their bosses on how hybrid work should be structured.

“When we poll employees, they’d rather have a two- to three-day model,” he said. “When we poll employers, it’s a three- to four-day model. So we’ll see how it evolves.”

Right now, the trends are clear for the downtown core in Canada’s second-largest city: Students are there. Tourists are back. And the area’s population is experiencing a surprising surge as more residents move in, even if the raw numbers remain small.

All that has been great for business. Foot traffic downtown largely returned to prepandemic levels this past summer, meaning people generally are gravitating there. The statistics show a reduction in the percentage of retail and service companies that have permanently or temporarily closed since the health crisis started.

But the lifeblood of the downtown core has for years been professionals, the people working at the banks, engineering firms and other public- and private-sector employers. The city centre is home to head offices of 24 companies with annual revenue topping $1-billion each, as well as 65 international organizations. And while their employees are dipping their toes back into their office environments, it’s not in great numbers.

The Chamber of Commerce’s most recent surveys show 63 per cent of Montreal’s downtown workers have returned to the office one to three days a week. Fewer than half say they’re satisfied with the employee experience at the office. Traffic congestion because of roadwork is also dampening their enthusiasm.

Their absence is having consequences, most notably on commercial real estate. The availability rate of office building space in Montreal’s downtown has roughly doubled since 2020 and now stands at 17.4 per cent, according to data from Altus Group. That number includes vacant space available now, as well as space where tenants have given their notice and do not plan to renew their leases.

The situation could get worse before it gets better. Altus forecasts that availability rates for Class A and Class B real estate, the highest-quality buildings, could reach 29 per cent by 2027.

Major companies such as Canadian National Railway Co., SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. and Laurentian Bank are all downsizing in the city centre as they embrace hybrid work models. For Laurentian, which is cutting the footprint of its headquarters on René Levesque Boulevard from 10 floors to five, the decision will drive employee retention and even give the lender “a competitive advantage in the war for talent,” spokesman Merick Seguin said.

Mr. Leblanc, an economist by training, is trying to plug those holes. To help companies find takers for their surplus square footage, the Chamber of Commerce launched an online platform where they can list space they have for lease or sublease. Such arrangements might pull in new businesses that previously would not have considered the downtown core, he said.

The Chamber of Commerce CEO and his team are also getting creative. The group curated a list of 14 projects and art installations that aim to make the city centre “a fun place to be” for workers, including The Ring – a circle sculpture several storeys high at the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec’s Place Ville Marie complex. And it launched TV and internet marketing campaigns playing up the positive aspects of working in-person.

Brett Miller, CEO of Canadian real estate company Canderel Ltd., sees a major role for property owners and managers in rethinking what the future office tower should be as the office-home balance shakes out.

“It’s no longer ‘Sign up a tenant, hook them into a 10-year lease and forget about them.’ It’s really much more of a service business,” he said. Mr. Miller predicts commercial landlords will offer more flexible leases and more amenities, such as bike racks and gyms. And he expects they’ll also host activities. “We’re going to be like the GOs, the ‘gentil organisateurs,’ at Club Med,” he said.

Downtown will survive even if office vacancy explodes, said Glenn Castanheira, a business development consultant who leads the downtown merchants’ association Montréal Centre-Ville. The area has bounced back from crises before, including the corporate decampment in the wake of the 1980 sovereignty referendum, and today it has stronger educational and cultural institutions, he said.

The biggest risk for Montreal now isn’t that the city centre hollows out but rather that its offices hollow out and commercial property values decline, Mr. Castanheira said. That’s a problem for Montreal’s municipal government in particular, which is hugely dependent on the taxes generated from downtown real estate, he said.

Companies that have their senior staff downtown and meet their stakeholders in person will be the successful ones that drive Montreal’s city centre forward, said Mr. Leblanc. “Those who say, ‘We can manage from Mont Tremblant or Lac Memphrémagog,’ I believe those companies will lag.”

La première photo a meme le bureau des ventés désuet!

 

54 minutes ago, Weka 29 said:

Avec un 20-25 étages de plus, il aurait ajouté au skyline dans l'est du centre-ville. Les Maestria auraient été moins isolées. 

Ça aurait dû être 25 étages de plus et servir comme annonce criante qu’on est au QdS.  Une opportunité gâchée par la ville. 

14 hours ago, SameGuy said:

Lol I passed by this afternoon but didn’t have time to grab any pics. Thank you!

There’s a lot going on at YUL right now. Can’t wait to see some small bit of optimism returning soon.

That’s good to hear.  Besides the REM anything else of interest you can share?

Le dernier paragraphe en dit long selon moi.  Je me souviens Coderre parlait d’ajouter (je ne me souviens plus du chiffre exacte) disons 50 000 nouveaux résidents en 15 ans par exemple … et ça avant la pandémie.

Il me semble c’est encore plus pertinent d’établir ce genre de cible mais j’ai l’impression que pour PM et Val ça ne semble pas être une priorité d’aucune façon.  Ça n’est quasiment irresponsable.  

1 hour ago, mawt1 said:

Moi c'est le fait qu'elle cachera le 1000 Bonaventure sur plusieurs bel angles qui me rend un peu triste car c'est pour moi la tour la plus symbolique de Montréal. 

Mais bon on ne va pas annuler toutes les constructions devant pour ne pas cacher une tour..! Surtout que le 900 va être bien.

1000 DLG  

Le site à l’instant avec le flatline Griffintown derrière. 

Une chance que le tronçon est seulement 1.25km.  This administration is a joke. 

https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/cavendish-extension-plan-unravelling-critics-say

News 

 

Local News

Long-discussed Cavendish extension plan unravelling, critics say 

Montreal's administration allowed a reserve on land to lapse, likely increasing the project's cost, and the final route is not yet set. 

Author of the article:

Linda Gyulai  •  Montreal Gazette

Publishing date:

Nov 03, 2022  •  21 minutes ago  •  6 minute read  •   Join the conversation 

In 2020, the administration of Mayor Valérie Plante abandoned a reserve on land to be expropriated for the Cavendish Blvd. extension. And now, the real estate company Olymbec has received regulatory approval from Town of Mount Royal to erect an industrial building on the site. PHOTO BY DAVE SIDAWAY /Montreal Gazette

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The City of Montreal’s decision two years ago to nix the acquisition of a piece of land where the Cavendish Blvd. extension has long been projected is about to prove a costly mistake, critics say.

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Montrealers come out of hibernation to bask in the spring…

 

City council and the island agglomeration council voted last week on a motion by Mayor Valérie Plante’s administration to place a two-year reserve on the same vacant parcel belonging to the real estate company Olymbec along Dalton Rd. in Town of Mount Royal, an initial step toward expropriation.

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The problem is that in 2020, the Plante administration abandoned a reserve that the previous administration of Denis Coderre had put on the property. And in the two years since that reserve lapsed, Olymbec has designed an industrial campus project for the site and already received regulatory approval from T.M.R. to erect an industrial building on the same spot. In fact, the company says it’s just waiting on T.M.R. to issue the construction permit.

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“They let the reserve lapse and now we have new obstacles,” said Côte St-Luc city councillor Dida Berku, whose suburb endorses the Cavendish extension to help ease congestion in the west end of Montreal. All municipalities on the island will pay for the extension as members of the Montreal-controlled agglomeration council.

Under Quebec law, a municipality can place a two-year reserve on property it wishes to acquire for a public purpose, such as building a road. The reserve, which can be renewed once to extend it by two years without interruption, effectively freezes any development on the property. The municipality has until the expiry of the reserve to acquire the property.

Berku said she now expects the cost to expropriate the land for Cavendish to increase exponentially because Olymbec can claim damages since it now has a project. And that raises the spectre of another delay for the plan to build a 1.25-kilometre connection between the two ends of Cavendish that are cut off by the CN and CP railway tracks, she said. The Cavendish extension has been discussed for over 50 years.

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End of the road: Northbound Cavendish Blvd. comes to a sudden stop in Côte-St-Luc. Talks of an extension date back more than 50 years. PHOTO BY PIERRE OBENDRAUF/Montreal Gazette

Architect Robert Libman, a registered lobbyist for Olymbec who has worked on the company’s plans for an industrial campus along Dalton, said in an interview this week that the new notice of reserve is in the hands of Olymbec’s lawyers because the company is contesting it. Asked how it will affect the cost of expropriation, Libman answered: “It could become a litigious file.”

During the period that the first reserve was in place between 2016 and 2020, Olymbec and the city negotiated on compensation for the eventual acquisition of the land, he said. But in 2020, “all of a sudden, the city sent an email to Olymbec saying they’ve decided not to go ahead with the acquisition or the expropriation of these parcels of land,” Libman said.

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“That’s the thing that’s very frustrating for Olymbec … that all of a sudden as they were very close to concluding a deal for the land, they were sent an email saying the city has dropped its plans to acquire the land.”

Libman, a former mayor of Côte-St-Luc, contends a Montreal civil servant told Olymbec in 2020 that the acquisition was scrapped because the Plante administration had abandoned the Cavendish extension.

“The city notified Olymbec that they’re no longer interested in going after the Cavendish extension,” he said. “They want to favour public transit. And extending Cavendish, creating more fluidity, would go against the grain in terms of their objective of public transit.”

However, the Plante administration says it has used the time to transform what was a “highway project” for Cavendish into an “exemplary urban boulevard” that will include greenery, public transit, bike paths and walking paths.

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“We took a step back and took the time to adequately look at what was the best,” Sophie Mauzerolle, the city executive committee member responsible for transportation and mobility, told the agglomeration council last week.

Olymbec’s property straddles Montreal’s St-Laurent borough and T.M.R. at Dalton, right where the northern portion of Cavendish ends. The company initially planned to build two industrial buildings on parts of the land that weren’t affected by the reserve, Libman said. However, “once the city informed them that they weren’t going ahead with the expropriation anymore, it created the possibility of building this campus,” he said. The company decided to reconfigure its project and add a third building. The site of the projected third building is where Montreal abandoned the first reserve and has just placed the new reserve, he said.

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Olymbec had already received authorization from St-Laurent for one of the two buildings in its original plan, Libman added. But since the company revised it and added the third building, the borough’s urban planning department has “kept saying they want to see what’s happening with Cavendish” before looking at Olymbec’s project, he said. That’s another “potentially litigious matter,” Libman said, adding it’s “something that our lawyers feel is an unjust trampling of Olymbec’s property rights.”

The two proposed St-Laurent buildings don’t affect the presumed corridor of the Cavendish extension and their proposed usage conforms to existing zoning regulations, he said.

Côte St-Luc city councillor Dida Berku says Montreal should commission studies as soon as possible to determine the optimal route for the Cavendish extension. “We don’t want to wake up two years from now and say, ‘Oh, we didn’t know it was going to be so expensive,'” she says. PHOTO BY DAVE SIDAWAY /Montreal Gazette

Meanwhile, Berku said she was surprised to learn last week that Montreal hasn’t yet determined the route for the Cavendish extension, even though the city deposited the project with Quebec’s Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE) earlier this year. The BAPE’s environmental impact assessment process is at the beginning stages.

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It has long been expected the Cavendish extension will include a branch to Royalmount Ave., and it has long been presumed that it will connect from Royalmount to the northern part of Cavendish via Dalton since Dalton is the closest street to Royalmount, Berku said. But that doesn’t mean it’s the most economical option, she added, noting that Dalton would have to be rebuilt to accommodate the extra traffic. And now that expropriation of the Olymbec land might become more costly, Montreal should perhaps avoid Dalton altogether, she said.

Berku said Montreal should commission studies as soon as possible to determine the optimal route.

“We don’t want to wake up two years from now and say, ‘Oh, we didn’t know it was going to be so expensive so we might as well take an alternative route’,” she said.

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Berku’s concerns are echoed by St-Laurent borough mayor Alan DeSousa, a member of opposition Ensemble Montréal party.

“I think the administration has an obligation to provide clarity with regard to what the route is and with regard to the different expropriations that are necessary to complete the route,” he said.

“If those expropriations are expensive, then we clearly need to do our homework to make sure whether an alternative route is (needed).”

Mauzerolle confirmed at the agglomeration council meeting that “the exact configuration” of the Cavendish extension “remains to be determined.” The proposal at the BAPE is “an intention of development.” Mauzerolle added that studies to determine the Cavendish route will be carried out later.

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The Cavendish project must go through the BAPE before the final route is decided, Marikym Gaudreault, a spokesperson for the Plante administration, wrote to the Montreal Gazette. “We’re following the normal process.”

The Cavendish extension is necessary to the Plante administration’s plans to build the city’s first car-free, carbon-neutral “eco-neighbourhood” on the adjacent Blue Bonnets-Hippodrome site near Namur métro station. The Quebec government included a contractual obligation for Montreal to complete the Cavendish extension when it ceded the Hippodrome site to the city in 2017.

Municipal documents tabled in council in February pegged the start of construction of the Cavendish extension as 2027.

 

https://montrealgazette.com/business/local-business/real-estate/office-vacancy-rates-seen-soaring-downtown-as-employers-vacate-space-consulting-firm

Real Estate 

 

Local Business 

 

Business

Office vacancy rates seen soaring downtown as employers vacate space: consulting firm 

Industry consultant Altus Group says office vacancy rates could hit 29 per cent by 2027. 

Author of the article:

Frédéric Tomesco

Publishing date:

Nov 01, 2022  •  8 hours ago  •  3 minute read  •   Join the conversation 

Canderel president-director general, Brett Miller in Montreal on Tuesday Nov. 1, 2022. PHOTO BY DAVE SIDAWAY/Montreal Gazette

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Office vacancy rates in downtown Montreal could soar to almost 30 per cent in the next five years as more employers cut their real estate footprint on the back of teleworking’s growing popularity, a new forecast says.

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Vacancy rates for Class A and B buildings – the two most prestigious categories of office real estate – may climb to at least 21 per cent and as much as 29 per cent by 2027, officials at industry consultant Altus Group said Tuesday. The upper forecast assumes that 40 per cent of the office space currently occupied by employers won’t be retained when leases expire, Altus said. In that case, some 14.7 million square feet of space would be vacated — about nine times the office capacity of a landmark building such as 1 Place Ville Marie.

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Like many other city centres, downtown Montreal has lost much of its worker base since March 2020 as teleworking — initially imposed by the Quebec government to cut contagion risks — gained widespread acceptance among employees. Vacancy rates downtown have risen steadily since the start of the pandemic, hitting 17.6 per cent in the third quarter for Class A and B buildings, Altus data show.

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“Teleworking is here to stay,” Sylvain Leclair, executive vice president at Altus in Montreal, said Tuesday during a presentation organized by the Urban Development Institute. “We see new leases being signed with reductions in square footage of 20, 30 or 40 per cent. We even saw a 50 per cent reduction recently.”

That drop in demand may eventually affect rents. For now at least, it’s mostly forced landlords to offer additional features or services — at no extra cost — when renewing leases.

“It’s supply and demand,” Leclair said. “Building owners have to increase rental packages. There will be pressure on rents over the next few years.”

Those conditions will inevitably lead to a drop in asset prices, according to Canderel chief executive Brett Miller, who says the real estate firm recently sold three office buildings. It was only a year ago that Montreal-based Canderel led an investor group acquiring Quebec City’s Cominar Real Estate Investment Trust in a multi-billion dollar deal.

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“I think there’s a correction coming,” Miller said. “The value of buildings is necessarily going to drop. When certain actors have been too aggressive on financing or their investment hypotheses, we will be there to react. But we’re not there yet.”

Andrée Roy, vice-president of real estate financing at Montreal-based lender Otéra Capital, shares Miller’s concerns.

“Office remains preoccupying for us,” Roy said. “Our main focus now is on prestige buildings. It’s a case-by-case basis.”

Compared with their counterparts in cities like Calgary, Montreal’s big employers have been “excessively timid” when it comes to bringing people back to the office, Miller said. And stepped-up renovation work in the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine Tunnel only runs the risk of making matters worse for the central business district.

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“When you have companies bringing people back four days a month, this is unacceptable for me,” he said. “And when you hear Premier Legault saying that teleworking is one of the solutions to (the half-closure of) the La Fontaine Tunnel, this is going to kill downtown. We are doing everything we can to revive the downtown core and encourage people to come back.”

For building owners, this means making the office more attractive by adding features such as employee lounges and bicycle parking, Miller said.

“You can no longer bet on the idea that you will have a large tenant who pays rent during 10 or 20 years,” he said. “You have to sell a service, not just square footage. Owners and managers have to think about how to revive the space, the building, and work hand-in-hand with the tenant to ensure that we can draw employees back to the office.”

ftomesco@postmedia.com

Valérie gets to check a box on the social housing to do list.  Top of mind for PM. 

La tendance se poursuit sur les balcons.  
 

 

 

Pub ce matin. 
 

https://georgeshenri.ca/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_PWmnqLx-gIVMYpaBR0mighrEAEYASAAEgKhCfD_BwE

On a pas le sentiment que la ville partage l’empressement de Devimco.  

But then the city is three years into this and now the Office de Consultation will be involved.  On s’entend que le GO pour « shovels in the ground » n’est pas pour demain. 

https://montrealgazette.com/business/clock-is-ticking-on-bridge-bonaventure-redevelopment-devimco-head-says
 

Clock is ticking on Bridge-Bonaventure redevelopment, Devimco head says 

“We need a clear and precise plan by the end of the year." 

Author of the article:

Frédéric Tomesco

Publishing date:

Oct 18, 2022  •  10 hours ago  •  4 minute read  •   Join the conversation 

A major landowner in the Bridge-Bonaventure sector is running out of patience with the city of Montreal, saying clear guidelines are needed at once on how to revitalize the last big available tract of downtown land.

“At some point soon, we’re going to need to know where this is going,” Devimco Immobilier president Serge Goulet said Tuesday in an interview. “We cannot wait three or six years. Every week, people are calling us about our land. We cannot hold on indefinitely without doing anything with it.”

Montreal is putting the finishing touches on a master plan to develop Bridge-Bonaventure — a preliminary version of which will be submitted to the city’s consultation office by Dec. 31, executive committee member Robert Beaudry pledged Tuesday. Developers such as Devimco say the city must specify exactly how the area will be rezoned, and whether additional public consultations will be required.

“We need a clear and precise plan by the end of the year,” Goulet said. “The city must also say what the rezoning process will be. What are the regulatory tools that will be used? This is what will dictate the timeframe. We need predictability. If a conventional model is used, the rezoning could be completed as soon as 2023. 

Montreal is more than three years into a consultation process aimed at redeveloping the Bridge-Bonaventure sector, a 2.3-square-kilometre mostly industrial zone that stretches from the western edge of the Old Port to the Victoria and Samuel-de Champlain bridges — and would have included a baseball stadium had local investors succeeded in bringing a franchise back to the city.

Billions of dollars will be needed to redevelop the area in a way that eases the housing shortage, combats climate change and deters urban sprawl by luring suburban families back to the island.

Asked about criticism over the length of the process, Beaudry said: “We want to be diligent, but we also want to ensure that there are social benefits for the population of Montreal. Our goal is to create neighbourhoods that meet the aspirations of Montrealers.”

Devimco has been amassing land in Bridge-Bonaventure since 2017, Goulet said. The firm owns four properties around the Peel Basin covering about 700,000 square feet of land, including a container terminal operated by Ray-Mont Logistics. It recently won the right to buy Old Port’s iconic Silo No. 5, a 900,000-square-foot property.

“Bridge-Bonaventure is the last big area of land downtown that’s available for redevelopment,” Goulet said. “We’ll never get another opportunity to develop more than 2 million square feet of land. It’s almost like starting from scratch. If we miss this opportunity, it would be catastrophic for the city and the province.”

Hearings will be held early next year by the Office de consultation publique de Montréal to discuss redevelopment options for Bridge-Bonaventure, Beaudry said Tuesday. Asked whether a final master plan could be adopted in 2023, he said: “That’s a possible timeline.”

“Everyone who took part in the consultation process recognizes that Bridge-Bonaventure is a complex sector, an area that’s difficult to access,” he said. “An enormous amount of energy will be necessary to re-qualify this sector as part of an urban renewal effort.”

Beaudry and Goulet spoke to the Montreal Gazette following the publication of two reports that focus on the future of Bridge-Bonaventure.

The first document sums up the views expressed by 19 community, social and economic organizations during a three-month consultation process. A consortium of property developers, architects and urban planners — which includes Devimco — had sought outside input this summer after going public in May with a common vision on how to rejuvenate the area.

Bridge-Bonaventure’s future redevelopment offers a unique opportunity to create an “exemplary neighbourhood” focused on durable mobility that would increase the supply of housing — especially affordable dwellings — while cutting the city’s carbon footprint, according to the report’s authors, economists Arnold Beaudin and Guy DeRepentigny.

A second report — commissioned by the Urban Development Institute, which represents real-estate developers, and written by three university experts — recommends a mixed-use development of the Bridge-Bonaventure sector that focuses on attracting “knowledge-based” employers instead of industrial companies and allows for high-rise development to free up ground space that can be devoted to pedestrian zones and the creation of parks. It also cautions the city against “over-regulation.”

The documents contain “an enormous amount of input” for the city, Beaudry said. “These are elements that we will be able to integrate into our thinking.”

Bridge-Bonaventure’s industrial area presents planners with some logistical challenges. Facilities in the area include those of the Port of Montreal, the ADM mill and several trucking companies.

Montreal presented its initial vision for the sector in late March — a document that includes plans for about 4,000 housing units and multiple green spaces. Devimco and its consortium partners subsequently proposed building more than 7,500 new housing units, retail businesses and offices in the Pointe-du-Moulin and Pointe-St-Charles Triangle sub-sectors, as well as the Peel and Wellington basins.

“One of the keys will be designing economic zones that serve as a buffer between industrial activities and future residential areas,” Beaudry said Tuesday. “How can we preserve these activities? What public investments are needed in public transit or green spaces? These are all elements that we are going to have to take into account.”

Improving access to the sector will be paramount. Montreal is eager to have a station of the Réseau Express Métropolitain built at the corner of Bridge and Wellington Sts., Beaudry said. Talks with CDPQ Infra, the REM’s promoter, have already begun, and further discussions will take place, he said.

“We know that having a station of the REM in the Peel Basin will make a huge difference in terms of access,” he said.