Angus plans 35 million real estate project for Montreal-Nord

Angus Development Corporation is migrating north. Associated with the Montreal North Neighborhood Table, she is preparing a project worth nearly $ 35 million to build a signature address of approximately 100,000 square feet in a "dormitory", "overcrowded" and "non-serviced" area of ​​the borough. A luminous building with its public square, shops and organizations whose mission is to generate pride.

Hugo Pilon-Larose
The Press

Less than five years from the end of the work to revitalize the Angus Technopole in Rosemont, Christian Yaccarini is not resigned to close shop. The Angus Development Corporation (SDA), a social economy enterprise of which it is the president, wants to pursue a "development of the territory responsive to the needs of citizens" elsewhere in the city. His new address: Montreal-North.

In partnership with the Montreal North Neighborhood Table (TQMN), Mr. Yaccarini is visiting these days properties to build a building with striking architecture in one of the poorest areas of the city: the north -is borough.

"I've lived in Montreal since 1976, and when I walked in the north-east sector of Montreal-North, I could not believe it. It's a desert of services! And yet, I pretended to know the east of the city, "exclaimed the energetic entrepreneur, accompanied by an interview with Press Steves Boussiki, General Manager of the TQMN.

North-East of Montreal-North, explains Mr. Boussiki, "it's a dormitory". A sector of the neighborhood where there is no park, no public place, few (or no) organizations, without even access to a CLSC or a medical clinic.

The Table he leads is engaged with Angus in the construction of a House of Social and Economic Innovation (MISE). This new address would "aim to restore pride," says Boussiki.

"When we have been suffering for a long time a media hype in which we are always the poorest, the least ambitious, it takes us a symbol. MISE is an address where people will be told: "This is something that looks like you," he explains.

Boldness

Christian Yaccarini has a mission. "We want to send the message to the residents of Montreal North that it is not true that we can not change things," he says. It is not true that they are condemned to live in an island (overcrowded) where there is not even a wall where young people can go chiller. "

MISE, which he describes with enthusiasm, would be a "great real estate project from which a series of small projects would start to render services to the population in a beautiful, pleasant space, with a stronger architecture than a normal building would command. ". For its design, the SDA intends to associate with the firm Provencher_Roy.

"It's the same thing we want to do in Montreal North. We want people to say to themselves, "Wow, we have something beautiful in our neighborhood!" We do not want an office building, but an address where people will go for services that will help them in their daily life with shops on the ground floor, "he continues.

And gentrification?

But who says real estate development in a poor sector often says gentrification. The tandem formed by Christian Yaccarini and Steves Boussiki reflects on it. The evicted tenants, once the lots were purchased, would be taken care of by the Montreal East Popular Housing Corporation (SHAPEM), they say. The organization "would accompany them in a relocation that increases their quality of life".

And if MISE becomes a "spark plug" to create other projects in Montreal North, what they want, the SDA would like to invest the neighborhood of similar projects over more than two decades.

"I would like to open up the sector, reduce its density, bring a social mix without excluding people by sending them to another ghetto," says Yaccarini.

The north-east sector of Montreal-Nord in figures

"14,710 families with children live in Montreal-Nord, a rate of 70% (63% in Montreal). Of these families, 41% are single parents (compared to 33% in Montreal) and 59% live in the Northeast sector. "

"(In Montreal-Nord), almost one-third (35%) of 0-5 year-olds are growing up in families with low incomes (23% in Montreal). In the Northeast, it is one in two toddlers (51%). "

"Tenants are the majority in the Northeast (92%). (…) According to a recent summary of the consultations and analyzes carried out in the northeast sector of the borough of Montreal-Nord, the residents are particularly concerned, first of all by the quality of the buildings and available housing (insalubrity, especially in insulation, poor quality and maintenance, and mismanagement of buildings) and secondly, by issues related to the affordability of housing and the importance of social housing (although rents are low in the sector, remain too high for the clientele). "

– Excerpts from the White Paper "Dare together change" of the Montreal-North Neighborhood Table