Owing to a unique mix of architectural influences and the fact that it held the status of the
largest city in Canada before the post-war suburban development boom, Montreal is among
the best cities in North America for so-called missing middle housing. This refers to housing
that's not as tall as high-rise towers but also not as spread out as detached homes,
and it includes residential styles like duplexes, triplexes, row houses, and low-rise apartment
buildings that are lacking in a lot of North American cities, especially ones that really
grew after World War II and applied a regime of restrictive suburban-style rules and regulations
against density.
This middle ground of housing is interesting because, if implemented properly, it can balance
advantages of lower density living, like personal space and independence, with advantages of
higher densities, like allowing more housing to be built and supporting more walkable and
sustainable neighbourhoods where people can live closer to things they need, like schools,
stores, parks, jobs, and bike shops. We’ve already covered the livability features of
Montreal’s housing in other videos, so in this video we’re going to dive deeper into
population density, profiling five Montreal neighbourhoods that achieve much more density
than typical North American suburban development while staying on a low-rise scale.
We’re going to start with the neighbourhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles, situated to the southwest
of downtown. An early industrial centre of the city due to trainyards, factories, and
the nearby Lachine Canal, this district is arguably the origin of the low-rise stacked
apartments that define so much of Montreal. Early versions of this distinctly Montreal
housing started to be built in this neighbourhood in the 1850s, and they were two floors at
first, with three-floor buildings starting to show up a few decades later. Although a
majority of these buildings have two or more units across separate floors, some are actually
just single-family attached homes, whether they were originally built like that or they
were converted more recently from something like a duplex.
Pointe-Sainte-Charles has a population density in residential blocks of around 15,000 people
per square kilometre, roughly five times denser than a block of single-family homes in a suburban
area of Montreal, where you’d typically find a density of about 3,000 people per square
kilometre. That’s a lot of density to achieve mostly through two and three storey buildings,
and it’s our first example of how denser urban living doesn’t have to mean towers.
A lot of this density comes just from avoiding particularly space-intensive suburban features
like prominent front lawns and space between houses. Most buildings here are attached at
the side, while on the front they either come right to the street or have modest setbacks
of one or two metres. What you don’t necessarily notice from the street though is that nearly
every building has a backyard, many of them with swimming pools.
These buildings weren't planned around swimming pools, originally the backyards were used
for wells, laundry facilities, and coal storage, but the prioritization of backyards over front
lawns is still really intriguing for modern day uses, because arguably backyards are more
functional. Even when people have large suburban front yards, that’s typically not where
they choose to put their sheds, pools, barbecues, swing sets, or other things they spend time
using. Often when people have prominent front yards the most time they spend there is mowing
the grass. Be honest, did you even use the front yard when playing The Sims?
Our next neighbourhood for Montreal’s not so missing middle housing is Mile-End, north
of downtown past the mountain. Mile-End was built a few decades after Pointe-Saint-Charles,
and as a result it has more three-storey residences. This brings Mile-End’s density to about
18,000 people per square kilometre, or six times denser than a detached suburban neighbourhood.
Mile-End and Pointe-Saint-Charles share a lot of space management features, including
prioritizing back yards over front yards and having buildings be attached on the side.
One difference though is that the newer and predominantly three-story buildings of Mile-End
tend to have more external structures on the building like external staircases, balconies,
galleries, and verandas. These extensions of the building give each unit more space
at the same building density. Along these lines, some residences, both in Mile-End and
Pointe-Saint-Charles, also have rooftop patios. This isn’t as common as maybe it should
be, but it’s a really clever way to add livable space, and it’s not just on new
buildings.
Another thing Pointe-Saint-Charles and Mile-End have in common is that they save space by
not having a large suburban driveway or garage, because they were built before widespread
car usage and most importantly before the mid-century planning idea that you can just
solve transportation by having everyone drive everywhere. There are still many cars in these
neighbourhoods, typically parked on the street or in the back alley, but these neighbourhoods
don’t universally have room for two or three or more cars per household like the suburbs.
Like Pointe-Saint-Charles, Mile-End has very working class origins, being at one point
the home of the city’s textile industry. Both neighbourhoods have experienced gentrification
over the past few decades but Mile-End especially so, having become a very trendy neighbourhood
associated with artists, cafes, bagel shops, and technology jobs. The old clothing factories
have been repurposed, and one of them now houses video game maker Ubisoft.
It made sense to start an overview of missing middle housing in Montreal with traditionally
working class neighbourhoods like Pointe-Saint-Charles and Mile-End, which cover so much of the central
city, but it’s important to mention that you can find similar enough neighbourhoods
spanning much of the income spectrum. The very richest people in Montreal live in mansions
at the top of the Westmount or Outremont summits of Mount-Royal, but many of the city’s medium
density neighbourhoods are middle or even upper class.
One example is the middle class district of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, or NDG, situated to
the west of downtown. This part of the city was built in the early 1900s, around the same
time as Mile-End, but NDG is visibly less dense, with most residences having two floors
instead of three and there being more gaps between buildings. Residences here also have
larger front yards, sometimes including a driveway. With that said, the front yard is
still pretty modest by suburban standards, and most buildings are attached. All in all,
NDG, especially the eastern sector closer to Westmount that we’re focusing on, still
works out to 9,000 people per square kilometre, or about three times as dense as a standard
suburban neighbourhood of detached houses.
According to the most extensive study of housing in the city, the willingness to have multi-family
and attached housing, even in middle class neighbourhoods, reflects Montreal being less
influenced by Anglo-American ideals surrounding home ownership and detached houses compared
to other cities like Toronto. The predominance of small-scale buildings of two-to-six units
instead of large centralized apartment blocks reflects the smaller scale of both landlords
and builders. Landlords were often just regular families wanting something like a duplex to
live in one unit and rent the other one out. This actually goes all the way back to the
New France era, when rules and customs made real estate less of a speculative asset that
would receive the attention of wealthier investors.
Montreal’s unique housing situation has deep cultural and economic roots, which helps
to explain why the city didn’t give up on medium-density housing even as it also participated
in the lower density suburban development boom after World War II. The east end neighbourhood
of Saint-Leonard, which was mainly built from the 1950s to the 1970s, has many sections
of single-family detached homes that could pass for anywhere else in North America, but
it also has blocks based on a variation of Montreal’s stacked apartments adapted to
fit more cars.
This more car-friendly suburban refresh of Montreal’s housing has two main residential
floors plus a semi-basement level with garages and more residential space, whether a dedicated
basement apartment or basement space for upper floor units. The modest room between buildings
and the always present driveways do take up space compared to the older neighbourhoods
we covered but consistently having three levels helps the density from falling that much,
even if some of the space is taken by the garage. The density in these sections of Saint-Leonard
is about 12,000 people per square kilometre, which as we’ve covered is about four times
higher than an average block of detached homes in Montreal but it’s also about three times
denser than the specific detached homes on nearby streets in Saint-Leonard.
In this video we’re mostly interested in the external features of these buildings,
but the internal room also matters. In Montreal, units in a mid-rise or high-rise building
typically have one or two bedrooms while detached houses typically have three or four. There’s
not a lot of overlap between these very distinct building configurations, but Montreal’s
medium density housing fits right in the middle, unsurprisingly, with one, two, and three bedroom
units being common.
The fifth and final neighbourhood that we’re going to profile in our exploration of medium-density
neighbourhoods is Angus, a new development in the borough of Rosemont in the city’s
east end. Construction of this district started in the early 2000s and continues today, on
the reclaimed site of the Angus Shops, a major train manufacturing facility that originally
made up the city’s second big industrial centre after the Pointe-Saint-Charles area.
This new development in Angus is a big departure from the other four neighbourhoods we’ve
seen in that the style is more modern and less distinctly Montreal. A few of the buildings
also go a little taller, up to six stories, which is higher than some definitions of the
missing middle. Still, overall we see this neighbourhood as falling within Montreal’s
tradition of medium-density housing, with around 12,000 per square kilometre, four times
higher than suburbia.
This density is achieved through a mixture of housing types, including two-to-three storey
townhouses, three-to-six storey condo complexes, and some semi-detached houses. Most of these
buildings have another level with underground parking, letting more cars be stored here
than in older neighbourhoods without them all taking up surface space, although underground
parking still either adds construction costs or takes space that could be used for other
purposes.
One interesting feature of this neighbourhood is that some sections have townhouses or small
condo complexes facing a courtyard instead of a street with traffic. This saves space
because there doesn’t have to be a street in front of everyone’s door, and it seems
like it blurs the boundaries between a backyard and front yard in interesting ways, because
this court is essentially a communal front yard that’s secluded from the street but
open to your neighbours. Of course, units also have their own modest but private back
patios and balconies.
Canadians and Americans are very used to associating density with tall buildings, so questions
of densifying cities usually end up as arguments about whether high-rise towers are good for
people or neighbourhoods. We definitely don’t oppose high-rise towers, especially when so
many cities are facing a severe lack of housing supply, but there’s a serious lack of imagination
when we can only think of housing at the two extreme ends of low density detached homes
or high density skyscrapers. These five Montreal neighbourhoods show that a range of intermediate
possibilities exist and should be part of the conversation too.
Interestingly, if you are someone who thinks that high-rise towers are bad for people or
neighbourhoods, this medium-density housing is exactly what you should want to see allowed
or even encouraged. One Montreal urbanism and transportation blog makes a good argument
that Montreal has fewer high-rise residential towers than Vancouver and Toronto, not to
mention lower rents, because of its abundant medium-density housing stock. If you restrict
most of your city to low-density detached homes, the small amount of land that is legal
to develop has to make up for that with even more units, and that means building higher
and higher.
In addition to showing that density without towers is possible, Montreal also allows us
to draw some lessons for how to achieve ground-oriented density. This obviously includes making use
of multi-family or attached buildings, but it also includes prioritizing backyards over
front lawns, having less room for cars or at least storing them underground, building
to three or maybe even four storeys instead of one or two, and adding livable space to
the building with balconies, verandas, and rooftop patios.
Thanks for watching through to the end of the video and sharing our fascination with
Montreal housing. From a policy perspective what we'd really like to see is North American
cities liberalize zoning rules to allow some substantial form of low-rise medium-density
housing to be built in all neighbourhoods by default. It's understandable that you can't
build a 30 storey building everywhere but you probably should be able to build a three
storey multi-unit building basically wherever you want, and without parking requirements
or excessive setback and lot coverage rules that substantially dilute the density and
add to the cost. If people want to build or buy detached suburban-style homes then that's
fine, but it's absurd to enshrine that one very particular housing configuration with
the special legal status of being the only type of housing allowed to be built on most
land in most North American cities.
These five not-so missing middle neighbourhoods all came out as three-to-six times denser
than typical suburbs. That relied on a suburban density benchmark of 3,000 people per square
kilometre, which is basically the median density of a residential block of single-family detached
homes on the island of Montreal. It’s definitely possible to build detached homes denser than
this, but in Montreal the higher end reaches about 5,000 people per square kilometre. It’s
also very much possible to build detached homes less dense than this, and these predominate
in a lot of smaller towns and cities in Canada, and in some surprisingly large U.S. cities
too.
The density values provided for the five neighbourhoods in this video were meant to be approximate.
For a more precise and in-depth exploration of density, the same blog mentioned before
has an analysis of a range of housing configurations in Quebec and the rest of Canada. I read this
a few years ago before we even moved to Montreal and it was a big influence in making us interested
in Montreal’s unique housing. We’ve linked that resource in the description, alongside
other resources like the report on the history of Montreal housing.