Quote:
Originally Posted by nephersir7
Being from one of those suburbs, I'd say there are multiple reasons for this.
First one is that suburban cities can only sprawl so much and now they are quickly running out of space to build housing, so they have to make the best out of the remaining land. This means either luxury SFHs or mid/low-rise apartment buildings.
Also, for some people, not having a lawn to mow, having a smaller electricity bill make low-rise apartments more attractive than SFHs. Why don't they choose the city? Because some people work in the suburbs, and because it's much more affordable than the city! In my suburb, a 1200sf 2 bedroom condo costs about 220k and includes two outdoor parking spots. On the island, it would cost twice as much, with no parking spot included. And the commute time to downtown is often better from the suburbs than some neighborhoods on the island.
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Are they really running out of space? Montreal doesn't seem to have a greenbelt or anything like that. Looking at real estate listings, the SFHs seem on the inexpensive side for new SFH in Canada, not that "luxury".
The development densities seem to be around 5000-6000sf per single family home and if something like this:
http://goo.gl/maps/3yv5Y
...is relatively representative on the multi family and similar to the 220k 2bed condos you refer to, that's about 1600sf of land per unit, assuming those are 8 plexes. The SFH lots are not particularly small, they're on the high end of what you'd find in Toronto or Calgary and certainly Vancouver, where 3000-4000sf is pretty typical. It would certainly be possible to build SFH on even smaller lots, and townhouses on smaller lots still.
Which brings me to my next point, why aren't there more townhouses being built? It seems like a good go-between between SFH and lowrise condos, and are typically almost as dense as those apartments and can be even denser if stacked or back to back. In Montreal, townhouses make up about 4% of new units off-island, compared to 40% for apartments and 47% for SFH. In Toronto it was 21% townhouses, 18% apartments and 51% SFH. The rest is mostly semi-detached homes.
As for prices in the suburbs vs the city, the places that are twice as expensive seem to be pretty close in and desirable areas. In neighbourhoods like Pointe-aux-Trembles, prices seem similar to new suburban condos.
http://www.remax-quebec.com/en/inscr...source=centris
There seem to driveway parking and a great abundance of on-street parking. Also, if existing housing is more expensive in the closer in neighbourhoods of Montreal, shouldn't that mean new construction is feasible? If it's expensive, it means there's strong demand, so as long as new apartments can be built for a price that is competitive relative to existing housing, they should sell quite well, regardless of the fact that it might be more expensive than in the outer suburbs.
There seem to be a decent amount of bungalows and low density properties in places like Ahuntsic that have transit and urbanity, and the low density is mixed with apartment buildings, so I'd be surprised if they were zoned low density. Some are getting a few large brownfield/greyfield developments, but I'm not sure how significant they are in the grand scheme of things, and there's little development within residential neighbourhoods.
Also the development doesn't have to be in Montreal to be urban. Are there any attempts to bring developments to suburban downtowns or creating new areas of urbanity? Perhaps most surprising to me though is the lack of development in the Greater Longueuil area. There's a good chunk of urban and semi urban neighbourhoods that seem well located but the area experienced no population growth at all between 2006 and 2011.
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