From: clamen@CS.CMU.EDU (Stewart Clamen)
Subject: GAZETTE: Tracing Montreal's Musical-Home Tradition -- to Anglos
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 92 08:12:57 GMT
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Reply-To: clamen+@CS.CMU.EDU
Originator: clamen@BYRON.SP.CS.CMU.EDU


I saw this article in the Gazette recently and remembered Denis
Beauregard's amusing Fete de St-Demenagement post.  

---
Stewart M. Clamen			Internet:    clamen@cs.cmu.edu
School of Computer Science		UUCP: 	     uunet!"clamen@cs.cmu.edu"
Carnegie Mellon University		Phone: 	     +1 412 268 2145
5000 Forbes Avenue			Fax:	     +1 412 268 5739
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, USA

----------------------------------------------------------------------

[The following article has been redistributed with the permission of
 the Gazette.]


	Tracing Montreal's Musical-Home Tradition -- to Anglos

			    David Johnson
			     The Gazette
		       [Saturday, July 4, 1992]



MONTREAL has always been a magnet for the poor.  First came the French
settlers who founded New France.  Of ever three who arrived, however,
two gave up and went back to France.  But of those who stayed,
two-thirds made the ultimate commitment.  They bought property.

   It wasn't until after the Conquest of 1759 that most Quebecers
became renters rather than owners of property.  "A nation of tenants,"
poet-politician Ge'rald Godin once said of Quebec.  But recent studies
are debunking the popular mythology that has long attributed the high
tenant rate to French-Canadian reluctance or inability to buy
property; the studies have begun pointing the finger at anglophones.

   Last Wednesday, the traditional July 1 moving day, 161,000
Montrealers played musical domicile, with three-quarters moving from a
home they didn't own to another home then don't own.  The city of
Montreal's tenant rate, 74.5 per cent in 1986, is the highest in
Canada.  Even in metropolitan Montreal renters are a majority: 55 per
cent.

   A new study by Universite' de Montre'al doctoral student Daniel
Massicotte traces the roots of Montreal's tenant history directly back
to the Conquest.  In 1731, Massicotte has found, only 35 per cent of
New France settlers were renters.  By 1825, as a result of British
immigration, the figure had jumped to 70 per cent.  And it's remained
fairly stable ever since.

   "A lot of housing studies attribute the high rental rate to the
industrialization of the mid-19th century; I'm saying the jump from 35
per cent to 70 per cent happened earlier, and was the result of
immigration, not industrialization," said Massicotte, who consulted
11,300 notorial documents for his PhD thesis on rental patterns in
Montreal between 1731 and 1831.

   The most significant immigration to Montreal in the early 19th
century, says Massicotte, began in 1815, after Wellington beat
Napoleon at Waterloo.  Unemployment soared in Britain after the war,
with discharged soldiers unable to find work.  To accommodate them,
Britain eased emigration rules, encouraging thousands to leave for
North America.

   The British Parliament, however, set up a two-tiered fare structure
for the boat trip oversees.  It imposed on adult emigrants to the
U.S., which had won its independence 39 years earlier, double the rate
it charged emigrants to Canada, still a colony of Britain.  What's
more, it allowed children going to Canada with their parents to travel
at one-third the price they could travel to the U.S.

   As a result, argues Massicotte, Canada attracted many more poor
British immigrants than the U.S. did.  Hence, Quebec's largest city
was once again serving as a magnet for the poor, as it did under the
French regime.  This time, though, it was doing so as a direct
consequence of Napoleon's defeat.

   From 1810 to 1830, Montreal's population doubled, to 25,000.
British immigration changed the face of the city: _The Gazette_, for
example, which was founded as a French-language paper in 1778 and
later continued as a bilingual paper, started publishing entirely in
English on Saturday, April 1, 1822.

   The low socio-economic status of British immigrants sparked a
construction boom in rental units.  In 1825, for example, 69 per cent
of Montrealers were renters, according to former  mayor Jacques
Viger's census.  By 1861, according to other studies, the rate had
jumped to 81 per cent.

   It was still 89 per cent in 1941.  Since then, the rental rate for
the city of Montreal has steadily dropped -- 82 per cent in 1951, 81
per cent in 1981, and 74.5 per cent in 1986.  If the 1991 census shows
another drop, it will mean Montreal's rental rate is now the lowest
it's been since 1825, though still the highest in Canada.  The city
of Toronto, for example, has a 60.5 per cent rate of rental housing.

   The declining Montreal rate doesn't mean the city is getting any
richer.  Rather, the drop is largely the result of artificial factors:
the 1983 annexation of Pointe aux Trembles, the division of duplexes
into co-properties, and city-subsidized gentrification efforts in
Little Burgundy, St. Henri and Ville Emard.

   The notion that francophones have historically been responsible for
the city's high tenant rate was shown to be a myth in another study,
this one by Marc Choko, a professor of urban studies at the Institut
National de la Recherche Scientifique.  Choko examined rental patterns
between 1921 and 1951 and found Montreal anglophones slightly more
likely than francophones to be renters.

   With the current political uncertainty in Quebec, many anglophones
are renters now for an entirely different reason: they fear the
separation of Quebec.  But renting is doubly attractive these days
because the city currently has a 6-per-cent housing rate.

   Experts expect immigration to make Montreal a city of tenants for
years to come.  One statistic says it all: nine of every 10 immigrants
to Quebec settles in Montreal.  And immigrants, generally speaking,
start off on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder.

   What's more, duplexes continue to be a uniquely popular form of
housing in Montreal.  In the days of New France, home owners used to
live in the same home as their tenants, renting out rooms or floors.
It was only after the Conquest that an early version of the
contemporary duplex first emerged in Quebec City.

   In a radical departure from the past, landlords started building
private entrances to their upper floors or rooms, and they connected
those entrances to the street with metal staircases.  This, says
Choko, was probably the origin of the outdoor curved staircases that
never fail to fascinate tourists to Montreal.


--
Stewart M. Clamen			Internet:    clamen@cs.cmu.edu
School of Computer Science		UUCP: 	     uunet!"clamen@cs.cmu.edu"
Carnegie Mellon University		Phone: 	     +1 412 268 2145
5000 Forbes Avenue			Fax:	     +1 412 268 5739
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, USA
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