Urban Sprawl prevention - make small units big

A recent trip to Greensboro NC.

You get there by motoring down the I-81 starting via New York state near Kingston.

At night the only visual stimulation consists of Wear-Your-Seat-Belt signs and an occasional one announcing the distance to the next city. There are surprisingly few of these.

First it's Syracuse then Binghampton, then on through hilly Pennsylvania, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre. The radio demagogues get dumber as you go along. They gripe against big government but also complain about those who oppose the Iraq War.

After about 10 hours I got off at Roanoke for a small road full of deer and then onto Greensboro, a fast growing small town where Friendly and Elm - which has about 1/20 th the foot traffic of Wellington in Verdun - is the main intersection. Greensboro is a fast growing city but had almost no downtown core. It redeemed itself somewhat with a fairly solid nightclub visit, where every ethnicity was boogie-ing down together. The next day I awoke and ate grits at the rather dodgy Waffle chain. Like all low-level service industries in the south, it was run by bright but somewhat desultory young blacks, much unlike those in our town. Then it was another 11 hours on the 40 West, through mountains then to Knoxville, Asheville, Nashville and finally to Memphis. Knoxville had terrible traffic jams and Nashville has an impressive skyline that beckons. Memphis itself is - like many other US cities - screwed by a lack of spending and planning. There's no real city there.

American boulevards are loaded with small, ugly structures flanked by plenty-o-parking, housing restaurants, cell phone shops, banks each which sit about 25 yards on boulevards that look like Taschereau. Homes are generally new and big. They have no basements or back yards, but they want those extra bedrooms and bathrooms.

Montreal also faces urban sprawl. Families are getting off the island fast and the town fathers and mothers are trying to think of ways to keep them here.
Some ideas, like former Mayoral Candidate Jerome Choquette's notion of putting tolls on the bridges were laughed at when proposed but are now being taken seriously. It's a bad idea that will backfire. The suburbs will no longer need Montreal, they'll end up getting their own separate downtowns. Some developers are already pushing for that, note the Centropolis thing in Laval, encouraged by the bad PQ idea of putting a metro up there.

Don't blame those who leave the city. Many want to own in Montreal but can't find apartments big enough to house their families. They need three or more bedrooms and at least two bathrooms. Our city tends to have one bedroom places. So here's the answer: an owner of a sixplex takes two of these units and unites them, suddenly he has a three bedroom, two bathroom apartment, exactly the thing that families want to own.

So you take a sixplex with six small flats and turn it into three family-sized condos. Two small one bedroom places become one three bedroom joint with a hudge kitchen and two bathrooms. That's what will keep people from moving to the 'burbs. The government should pay owners to make the switch.

To end the flight to the suburbs, Montreal must encourage landlords to take two smaller units and make them into one larger family-friendly unit.