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Peel Basin | No room for Bronfman and Devimco at the round table

The City of Montreal is continuing its reflection on the future of the Peel Basin, in the southwest of downtown. It has just set up a round table to help it formulate its development vision, but without inviting the main private promoters with an interest in the sector.


Posted on August 30, 2021 at 7:00 a.m.

André Dubuc

André Dubuc
Press

Absent subscribers include Stephen Bronfman’s Montreal Baseball Group, which wants to build a major league baseball stadium there, and Devimco, which has purchase options over large swathes of land adjacent to Peel Basin. The latter wishes to develop an ambitious residential district there, coupled with a pole of jobs in clean technologies as well as civic facilities.

This is not the first time that the City of Montreal has ignored Mr. Bronfman. Last spring, as part of a citizen consultation entrusted to the Institut du Nouveau Monde, the City forgot to invite Groupe baseball Montréal to participate in the first three workshops. The group subsequently requested and obtained permission to participate in the last two workshops.

Read the article “Consultation at the Peel Basin: the City of Montreal forgot to invite Stephen Bronfman”

The Peel Basin sector is strategic because of its size, approximately 8.5 hectares, and its location, the southwest gateway to downtown.

According to the information reproduced in a brief from the Urban Development Institute of Quebec (IDU), published this Monday morning, the round table is made up of 16 people, a majority of whom are made up of city officials (4) and members of community groups (5).

Landowners in the public sector, such as the Canada Lands Company, are also around the table with four representatives, as well as three representatives of economic players: the South West Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the ADM mill. Agri-industries and the Forges de Montréal.

For the moment, the presence of the IDU around the table is not assured either. The organization, which defends the interests of real estate developers, has published on its own initiative a brief to voice its vision for the future of this neglected sector, which used to be industrial.

“In addition to our presence at the table, we are asking that there be five promoters so that there is an understanding of economic interests,” said Jean-Marc Fournier, CEO of the IDU, in the same way that we find there five civil society groups. It’s great that the committee has an understanding of social interests, but at the table so far there has not been the same understanding of economic interests. We want to ensure that we have a distribution that allows us to see all the issues. The IDU is also proposing the addition of two elected municipal officials.

In addition, the Institute invites the mayoress Valérie Plante and the other candidates for mayor to specify, before the municipal elections, their vision concerning the future of the Peel basin and of the entire sector called Bridge-Bonaventure, which includes in particular the Pointe-du-Moulin (the silo nO 5) and the City of Le Havre.

“The elections are not a pretext for delaying action,” says Jean-Marc Fournier, “but a good opportunity to share his vision and to get involved. Elections are always a good time to say something. One of the purposes sought with the tabling of our brief is to suggest to the various candidates to express publicly what they intend to do and at what pace they intend to do it. ”

A port of Hamburg cited as an example

For its part, the IDU wishes to see in it an integrated urban development with economic, cultural, civic activities – read school – and residential with its share of social housing. He cites the example of the successful urban redevelopment of the port of HafenCity in Hamburg, Germany.

The objective is to carry out a development there according to the principle of the “City of the quarter of an hour” elaborated by the professor Carlos Moreno. Mr. Moreno will also be the guest of the IDU at an upcoming webinar in September.

“The quality of the fittings and the architectural integration of the buildings make it a European benchmark”, we read in the Institute’s brief.

According to IDU estimates, it is possible to build 11,000 housing units in addition to developing nearly 4 million square feet of land for civic, sports, community and employment uses in the Bridge-Bonaventure sector. (Peel basin and Pointe-du-Moulin, among others).

The Institute arrives at these figures based on a construction density similar to what is proposed in the special urban planning program (PPU) for the Faubourgs district, at the south-eastern entrance to the city. The organization is also advocating for the construction of a Metropolitan Express Network station south of Wellington Street.

The IDU proposes that a draft PPU for the Bridge-Bonaventure sector be presented at the beginning of 2022. The Office de consultation publique de Montréal would then begin its work. The goal is to adopt the zoning by-law in 2023.

“We must move forward now,” says Fournier. I wrote it a year ago. I’m still writing it. I hope we will get there at some point. ”

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