Focusing on sustainable transportation and affordable housing, the plan will remedy the prior development of Côte-des-Neiges as “a drive-through area,” says borough mayor Gracia Kasoki Katahwa.
The City of Montreal will adopt the master plan for the development of the Namur-Hippodrome neighbourhood — described as an inclusive and sustainable city within the city — at its next council meeting in mid-December.
“With the adoption of this master plan, we will be moving one step closer to the establishment of the Namur-Hippodrome neighbourhood, one of the most significant urban development projects of the next decade in the metropolis,” said Robert Beaudry, the city’s executive committee member responsible for urban planning, homelessness and the public consultation office.
“We are bringing our vision to life of a Montreal on a human scale,” he added, “where sustainable transportation and affordable housing come together to create an exemplary milieu de vie.”
At its meeting on Monday, the Côte-des-Neiges—Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough council will adopt changes to its bylaws that will allow developers to start submitting permit requests in the new year, said borough mayor Gracia Kasoki Katahwa.
“After all these years of consultation and discussion, we are now at the stage where we are ready to go to receive permit requests for the first projects for the Namur-Hippodrome neighbourhood, particularly in the Namur section,” Kasoki Katahwa said in an interview with The Gazette on Thursday.
The plan is to transform the former Blue Bonnets racetrack site and the area surrounding the Namur métro station into a “15-minute” neighbourhood, whose 40,000 residents will be able to access most of the services they need within 15 minutes of their homes. The idea is to minimize car use within the neighbourhood, through a carefully designed network that will include a tramway, bus routes and safe bike and walking infrastructure.
The former racetrack site will require an estimated $1.4 billion in urban infrastructure, such as water pipes, sewers, roads and sidewalks, before housing development can begin.
The city has said it intends to have most of the housing units built within 10 years, with work beginning in the sector around the Namur métro station. The new neighbourhood would have its own schools, a library, medical clinics, a public square, an outdoor market and green spaces equivalent in size to 20 soccer fields.
The racetrack was closed in 2009 and the province ceded the site to the city in 2017 on condition that it start building housing there within five years. That obviously did not happen, so in May 2023, the city and the Quebec government set up a committee to come up with a financial plan to accelerate development of the site. That committee, called GALOPH (Groupe d’Accélération pour l’Optimisation du Projet de l’Hippodrome), includes experts in urban planning, housing and finance. The federal, provincial and municipal governments have jointly committed $6 million to support the work of the GALOPH committee.
“Côte-des-Neiges in past decades was developed as a drive-through area. … Now we want to develop the Namur-Hippodrome sector, but especially the Hippodrome sector, as a milieu de vie for the people of Côte-des-Neiges. In past decades, they put the Décarie highway through here, they put all kinds of roads, and we get all kinds of cars from the cities and boroughs around us that create nuisances for the people who live in Côte-des-Neiges.”
Kasoki Katahwa said previous administrations had planned to bring major roads to and through the Hippodrome sector. They were talking about a “place that would have a highway right through it and we would have all these people stuck living in this enclave with trucks and busy highways. I refuse to develop the Namur sector along that same logic.
“I am happy with the project as it has been presented and as it will be adopted in the next few weeks and days. It is a project that respects the will of the people of Côte-des-Neiges to live in a livable and peaceful neighbourhood. Yes, we want to open it up and we will find other ways to get the trucks through, but it won’t be inside our neighbourhoods.”
She said she understands that employees who work in the industrial zones of St-Laurent and Town of Mount Royal need to get to work, but she added that experts will have to find a way to move traffic that doesn’t flood the new neighbourhood.
In fact, next year the city plans to mandate a new “travel management centre” to encourage employees of those industrial sectors to use more sustainable transit.
“In the same way that the people of Town of Mount Royal want to live in a garden city, in the same way that the people of Côte-St-Luc want to reduce through-traffic, it is the same for the people of Côte-des-Neiges. We also want a neighbourhood that is peaceful. We will find a way for the trucks and the cars, but it won’t be through the Hippodrome neighbourhood.”
The plan calls for a tramway along the Jean-Talon axis, connections to the REM and improvements to the sector’s two underused métro stations. The city is negotiating to get the regional transit authority, the ARTM, to add two new stations to the St-Jérôme commuter train line serving the sector.