Housing in Montreal is very different from the English-speaking cities in Canada we’ve
lived in or visited, which mostly follow the standard North American neighbourhood style
of single-family detached houses that are sometimes broken up by high-rise condo or
apartment towers.
In Montreal, on the other hand, the dominant kind of housing is duplexes, triplexes, and
other low-rise multi-unit buildings that provide more population density than detached homes
but less population density than high-rise towers.
This unique housing environment exists because French Canada has different architectural
traditions from English Canada and because Montreal is a relatively old city by North
American standards, so much of it was built before cars came to dominate public life and
urban planning.
This video is about the distinct character and livability of Montreal’s neighbourhoods,
and why English-speaking cities in Canada and the United States could learn something
from Montreal about creating walkable, affordable, lively cities.
The quintessential Montreal housing style is called a multiplex or just a plex, which
is basically a small apartment building that fits two, three, or sometimes four floors
of stacked dwellings on a relatively modest residential lot.
The most basic configuration is a duplex, which has two units, one on each floor. With
one additional floor this becomes a triplex, with three units. With a wider building for
two units on each floor you can have a sixplex. Other configurations exist too, but these
are pretty typical.
Low-rise multi-unit housing exists in lots of cities in Canada, but it’s mainly in
Quebec and especially Montreal where it really defines large neighbourhoods and takes on
the characteristics that we’re going to talk about here.
These buildings, at least the classic style of Montreal plex that we’re focusing on
here, were mostly built before World War II, although there are many post-1990 additions
that follow a similar concept and fit in well to these neighbourhoods.
Traditionally in plexes it was common for the owner to occupy one unit and rent the
rest out, although a variety of occupancy structures are possible. Sometimes all units
are rented, and sometimes the building is divided between different owners, including
condo-style ownership.
The fundamental fact about the Montreal multiplex that we want to draw attention to is that
it can provide significantly more population density than single-family homes, while retaining
features of livability like being ground-oriented and providing a sense of space and independence.
Why do we want density at all? Well, in a growing city you really need densification
to give people places to live, unless you want to rely entirely on urban sprawl, but
that comes with a lot of financial, ecological, transportation, and even health problems.
Population density can benefit livability because it allows a neighbourhood to support
a good mixture of schools, stores, and other amenities within walking distance. Density
also helps to better support cycling and transit infrastructure.
In the neighbourhood that we’ve been living in, which is the densest of Montreal’s boroughs,
we have eight markets or grocery stores within a twelve minute walk, along with countless
other shops and restaurants, and some of the best bicycle and transit infrastructure in
the country.
But the housing is still ground-oriented. You can easily step out your door and go to
the park around the corner, without having to spend time in hallways or elevators. You
can talk to people on the street from your balcony. In a lot of cases you still have
access to a backyard.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with high-rises, but they’re not for everyone, and they should
not be the only outlet for density. This is housing on a human scale: not too tall that
you need an elevator to reach the ground, or too spread out that you need a car to reach
a grocery store.
In addition to being ground-oriented, another way that Montreal’s plexes create very livable
density is by making units feel independent from each other. Enabled by the famous external
staircases, each unit usually has its own entrance, or shares an entrance with one other
unit.
The trend is to minimize shared interior areas, from hallways to laundry rooms. It’s common
for each unit to have its own washer and dryer, which is a much appreciated convenience that
isn’t the norm on rentals in other cities we’ve lived in, except maybe on higher-end
condo rentals.
Each unit in these plexes also usually has its own street address and mailbox, instead
of an apartment number and mail room. All of these features together contribute to livable
density by making it feel less like you’re sharing a building with other people.
There are some disadvantages to the lack of common space though. Having to take your own
garbage and recycling to the street on the right day each week is less convenient than
putting it in a centralized room or chute whenever you want, like you could do in a
larger building.
The next livability factor is personal space. We don’t have data on plexes in particular,
but rental units have more bedrooms in the Montreal region than in Canada’s other biggest
metropolitan areas, especially Vancouver, on average.
This might be due to Quebec having more of a culture of renting than English Canada,
so more rentals are built with families in mind. It probably also helps that floor space
is less expensive to build in this type of housing than in high-rise towers. Regardless,
it makes the rental market more accessible to families or people who want more room for
an office or fitness area.
Montreal’s multiplex housing also manages space in interesting ways. Units commonly
stretch from the front to the back of the building, taking a long but narrow layout.
This allows for more noise and space separation between opposite ends of the apartment, as
well as light and air through windows at both ends, but it comes at the cost of more space
taken by your hallway.
On the outside of the building, plex housing manages space well by embracing balconies.
Montreal takes balconies so seriously that it’s not uncommon for a unit to have two:
one in the front of the building and one in the back, which also functions as a fire escape.
Because balconies are closer to the ground here, they’re used for more than just getting
air or having a view. It’s not uncommon to see people chatting between balconies and
the street, and we’ve seen more extensive balcony gardens here than we have in other
cities.
Another important part of livability is the cost of living. Montreal, like most other
Canadian cities, got less affordable in the 2010s, but so far it’s still substantially
cheaper to rent or buy housing here than in Canada’s other two biggest cities, Toronto
and Vancouver. Montreal’s housing costs are more comparable to mid-sized Canadian
cities like Calgary and Ottawa.
Montreal’s embrace of medium-density housing—in its old and new housing stock—has been argued
to be one reason for this, because this type of development uses valuable land more efficiently
than single family homes while avoiding the extra building costs of high-rise towers.
We talked about our current Montreal neighbourhood being very walkable, but it’s not just the
number of shops. It’s also the proximity of shops. Residential streets aren’t far
from commercial streets, and residential streets themselves have some reasonable commercial
activity too.
You wouldn’t want to live too close to a bar or live music venue, but what about a
bookstore, cafe, or brewing supply store? These things can be found on otherwise residential
streets, and they add to vibrancy and walkability without, in our experience, causing any trouble.
This is extremely different from the suburban development norm of packing most shops into
car-dependent strip malls or shopping plazas, but it’s also more of a mixture of residential
and commercial uses than we had when we lived in an older denser neighbourhood of Toronto.
We’re not saying that this type of housing or neighbourhood works for everyone. People
with reduced mobility might prefer a larger building with an elevator, and people who
prioritize space and privacy above everything will still prefer a house in the suburbs or
even countryside.
But after living in Montreal it seems pretty clear to us that lively, walkable, medium-density
neighbourhoods can succeed in the North American context. And it’s not just a quirky preference
of locals, because these are popular neighbourhoods for tourists to visit and stay in.
The Plateau, which is the densest and most walkable borough of Montreal, mostly due to
multiplexes, has 5% of the population of the island of Montreal but 29% of the Airbnb listings.
It’s the second most popular neighbourhood for Airbnb in the city, after downtown.
Unfortunately it’s not just a question of consumer preference. You cannot even legally
build this kind of neighbourhood in most places in Canada, due to minimum parking requirements
and zoning rules that restrict most neighbourhoods to single-family detached housing. Even Montreal
is not immune to these rules, especially in newer areas of the city.
There’s reason to be optimistic here though. Edmonton, the fifth largest municipality in
Canada, recently removed minimum parking requirements and single-family detached zoning. This obviously
isn’t going to turn Edmonton into Montreal, but as more cities loosen these suburban regulations
we do think that lessons can be learned from Montreal’s successes.
In this video the kind of multiplex that we focused on was the denser type of development
that’s characteristic of older, more central, generally more francophone neighbourhoods
of Montreal like the Plateau, Rosemont, Verdun, and Hochelaga.
To the west of downtown, in more English neighbourhoods, you’ll find more standard walk-up apartment
buildings that aren’t much taller than plexes but have a larger footprint. These can provide
ground-oriented density but they miss out on some of the interesting features we talked
about, like separate entrances and the feeling that units are independent from each other.
Further from downtown you can find increasingly more suburban-style plexes, which are built
with more accommodations for cars like driveways and garages. These are interesting because
they have more rooms and larger yards, which families can appreciate, while actually being
able to retain a reasonably high population density in a lot of cases.
Unfortunately, these neighbourhoods are usually not as walkable as they could be due to suburban
design choices like larger roads, fewer intersections, and more shopping plazas.
And then of course you can still find single-family detached houses in Montreal, especially in
the more English suburbs of the West Island. High-rise condo and apartment towers are most
common downtown but are sprinkled throughout other neighbourhoods too.
As for other cities in Quebec, in our experience plex housing is common there but not quite
as prevalent, and also not built as densely. The only place we’ve seen with comparable
density, atmosphere, and walkability to Montreal’s multiplex neighbourhoods is Quebec City, specifically
the neighbourhoods of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Saint-Roch, and Limoilou.
Thanks for watching through to the end of the video. While we’ve explored Montreal
pretty extensively and also read all the literature we could find on the city’s housing, we
have only lived here for a year so far, so if you have anything else to add on housing
in Montreal or the rest of Quebec we’d be happy to hear about it in the comments.