MONTREAL—Every real estate agent in every city around the world knows someone like Frédérick Chabot.
He and his wife decided in the fall of 2009 to leave Montreal’s trendy downtown Plateau neighbourhood, with its narrow streets, skyrocketing prices and chic stores and restaurants, in search of greener pastures. The move was sealed with the arrival of their second daughter. Chambly, a suburb 30 kilometres south of Montreal, offered a yard for the girls and a more spacious, affordable home.
But more than anything, it was a move to a city that was growing and improving, and away from one that the investment adviser felt was struggling to maintain a substandard status quo.
“When you pay (taxes) you want to see your environment improve, not the inverse. The costs were going up all the time and the services went down all the time,” says Chabot, who spent 20 years in the neighbourhood. “The other reason was that after two children there is obviously a question of space and in the city there is less of it.”
Chabot’s tale is hardly unique to Quebec’s largest city, but there is both statistical and anecdotal evidence to suggest that a city once considered one of the most affordable and family-friendly in Canada is steadily losing its young families.
The reasoning is no surprise to those who live here. Where a visitor might see smiling musicians busking outside a subway stop, locals know all too well about the rush-hour power outages that seem to plague Montreal’s metro system down below. The street parking and colourful walk-up apartments may seem charming, until you are shovelling freshly plowed waist-high snow or fighting off vertigo while straining to get your groceries in the house. Public schooling is inferior and private schooling is expensive. And the city’s roads are either in full repair and causing traffic headaches, or in need of repair and the source of sputtering frustration.
Looming over the trending exodus is the risk of hollowed-out schools, half-empty playgrounds and a weakening of what some experts call the social cement of every city — its children.
That may explain why four weeks out from the vote to pick Montreal’s next mayor — and in a tumultuous year that has seen two former mayors done in by corruption allegations and criminal charges — each of the front-running candidates is promising vast efforts to end the flight of young families to the suburbs.
“It’s the big issue of this campaign and all of our platform . . . turns around the question of the retention of families,” mayoral candidate Richard Bergeron noted at the campaign kickoff for his Projet Montreal political party.
“When Montrealers arrive at that crucial step in their lives — the foundation of a family or the purchase of their first home — we absolutely need them to choose to do it in Montreal.”
The figures are quite clear that in any of the last 10 years, between 20,000 and 24,000 individuals have moved off the Island of Montreal, with the bulk of them opting for the commuter towns directly to the north and south of the city.
The actual impact of this migration is the subject of some debate. Bergeron claims the city is losing out on up to $50 million in taxes that would be paid directly to the city if families were buying newly built housing within the city limits, not to mention $2.5 billion in economic activity.
Pierre Bélec, the former director of Montreal’s official family policy, says a city loses some of its spirit, its hope, its sense of community when there aren’t as many children sliding, cycling and skipping through its streets.
“I never had so much contact with my neighbours than when I had kids in the house. Children are a social cement, a principal means of communication between neighbours,” he says. “For that, it’s worth the trouble to ensure that there are children in the city.”
The reasons, whether financial or emotive, have pushed each of the perceived front-runners to promise that more affordable-housing units will be built on their watch. Most are going further, whether it be a big break for families on the one-time “Welcome Tax” that new homebuyers are forced to pay, from candidate Melanie Joly, to an aggressive pledge from Bergeron to replace free parking spots for municipal employees with a free transit pass, along with economic incentives for city workers to live within Montreal’s boundaries.
Marcel Cote, a successful Quebec businessman, is also promising the creation of another family policy — inviting a critical look at the first such policy introduced at city hall in 2008.
“It’s definitely only had minor successes,” says Nik Luka, a professor at McGill University’s architecture and urban planning schools.
Despite status reports on Montreal’s four-year family plan that talk about parks, swimming pools and summer camps, Luka says the policy produced two big realizations. First was that subsidies for housing developers to build family-sized homes would have to be set at a financially unsustainable $25,000 per unit, up from the $15,000 the city had been offering, if they had any hope of working.
The second realization was that the city was doing a poor job of getting Montrealers to consider communities on the periphery of the city, such as Verdun or Lachine, that offer young families some breathing space and price breaks but keep the tax revenue they represent within the city limits.
Bélec, who was Montreal’s general in the first battle to retain young families, says there were also some valuable lessons learned about their motivations.
“No matter what we do, the first factor is the economic factor for the retention of families,” he says.
The second concern is how secure their children will be in an urban environment, but it has nothing to do with the mafia, street gangs or robbers.
“The word security for parents means that they worry for the safety of their children because of the presence of large numbers of cars that drive fast even in residential areas. That is exclusively what it means.”
Speed limits in residential zones have since come down to 30 km/h or 40 km/h from 50 km/h, Bélec says. There are more family change rooms at swimming pools and some reserved parking spots for families at municipal buildings.
But all of that is for naught if the core housing problem can’t be resolved, says Luka, who has consulted with the city of Montreal on how to retain families. There isn’t much in the content of the mayoral election platforms that gives him hope the problem will be solved in the next mandate.
“What I see in the bits and pieces that are being put forward by the candidates is that they are nice gestures but I don’t see any of them as actually having any real effects,” says Luka.
The studies, he says, have shown that about 40 per cent of Montrealers who leave are being pushed out rather than lured away because they can’t find suitable housing at an affordable price. In other cities, people are lured away by the promise of a fenced backyard and two-car garage.
“Montreal households are more willing to make the switch into urban housing whereas in other Canadian cities there’s still a preoccupation with a detached house or a semi-detached house.”
Internationally, there are some models that offer a way out of the downtown conundrum, including location efficient mortgages adopted in some U.S. cities to provide access to a bigger bank loan by factoring in a downtown family’s savings on transportation costs. Other measures allow American homeowners to write off mortgage payments and reduce their income tax, providing a great incentive to purchase a home.
Another model in Germany has an association of prospective homeowners, known as building groups, purchasing land at a discount from the city to design and construct housing units designed specifically for their needs. It’s maybe a lot of work for young families already pulled in all directions with work, kids and other responsibilities.
“But by the same measure, that’s part of the challenge, right? We’re trying to ensure that middle-class households are able to stay in neighbourhoods that they like, because they have an important stabilizing force,” says Luka.
Looking back on his family’s move out of Montreal, Chabot thinks the city officials and mayoral candidates may be wasting their time coming up with strategies about how to retain families. The city-versus-suburb debate should not be an either-or argument, but seen as natural progressions in the cycle of life.
Young students move to big cities to study, make friends, find jobs, fall in love and have children before they begin to experience the complications and costs of an urban life that was once carefree and exciting, he said.
“I think it’s normal to have a migratory movement toward the suburbs, where we can have more space and maybe more security for the children,” Chabot says. “After that, the kids grow up and move to the city because they’re sick of the suburbs and the parents sell the house because they’re sick of the suburbs too, and move back to a condo in the city to be closer to culture and activities.”