Westmount considering some zoning changes to encourage redevelopment

A bilingual sign for City Hall is shown in the city of Westmount on the island of Montreal, Friday, August 5, 2022. (Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press)

Westmount will be looking at a proposal to increase height allowances up to 20 storeys in part of the city’s southeast area to encourage redevelopment at Monday's council meeting.

The change would affect a stretch of St-Catherine Street and part of the Dorchester area.

Mayor Christina Smith says the city has been brainstorming ways to make St-Catherine more attractive for commercial activity and maybe add housing units. It commissioned architecture firm Lemay to draft an urban plan to do so.

She says the firm held public consultations and met with stakeholders to come up with ideas, but nothing is set in stone. In December, some critics penned a letter to The Montreal Gazette saying that densifying the area is not enough if it doesn’t produce welcoming spaces.

Rather than seeing high-rises next to heritage buildings like the Atwater Library, they want family housing between four to seven-storey buildings, terrasses, tree cover and play spaces.

“I think there was some concern that this was a done deal, and we were throwing up glass towers all over Saint Catherine Street, and without any care in the world. It’s not the case at all,” Smith told CTV News.

She says the city wants to rethink zoning because it hasn’t “been able to garner any interest or any project that’s come to fruition.”

She stressed that there will be more public consultations during this process. She says previous consultations particularly raised concerns around St-Catherine Street being underutilized on the south side.

Smith pointed to the closure of Cabot Square’s Metro entrance in November, citing security issues. Montreal’s transit authority (STM) faced backlash over the move, but said it was to “help reduce the incidence of mischief and undesirable or dangerous behaviour, such as intimidation and drug use.”

“Often housing will fill a council chamber, right? Whether it's expropriating land or whatever, which we are not doing,” says Smith.

“There's no demolition of any heritage buildings or homes or but … obviously there's great concern about the housing issue in this country, and so that also plays into this.”

Smith says there may be another proposal brought forward later this year after the city and Lemay get more feedback from residents, engineers and urban planners.

“We are not granting any specific project [permits] here. There's no architecture that's been looked at. We're not at that phase at all. But we are hearing from people,” she says.

For example, some residents are asking for a community pool while others are “adamantly opposed” to it, “and we’re taking all of that information in,” says Smith.

With files from CTV Montreal's Olivia O'Malley