Southeast redevelopment:
Heritage vs. density

Former Westmount Mayor Peter Trent ramps up the opposition to the proposed plan

By Irwin Rapoport

Updated September 12, 2025

Opposition continues to mount against Westmount’s plan to redevelop a portion of the southeastern part of the city adjacent to downtown Montreal, and in particular, the Atwater Metro station.

Westmount Magazine visited the subject on July 26 with Plan to redevelop southeast divides Westmount residents, featuring a Q&A with District 8 Councillor Kathleen Kez, who represents the southeast section of Westmount.

The latest salvoes against the Southeast Special Planning Program (SPP) were courtesy of former Mayor Peter Trent (1991-2001 and 2009-2017).

Peter Trent at Parks Canada presentation in City Hall, 2016 • Image: courtesy of Peter Trent

The first shot was his Gazette column Trent: What does transit-oriented development really mean? Time for a TOD Talk, and on September 4, Trent addressed an attentive audience at the Atwater Library and Computer Centre, a historic institution on the eastern edge of the proposed redevelopment area, with a talk entitled How Transit-Oriented Development can impose high-rises while destroying our built heritage.

The column and speech were strategically timed as the final approval of the SPP was on the agenda of the September 8 city council meeting.

Bowing to public pressure, outgoing Mayor Christina Smith, a major proponent of the SPP, postponed the vote for the adoption of the SPP to September 18 so that some tweaks could be made to the plan. For the Tupper parking lots owned by Westmount on the north side of Dorchester, heights were lowered from 7 to 6 stories. The section of Dorchester, which is privately owned, will remain the same, being 7 stories with a possibility of 12 stories if you include the 5-story bonus zoning.

The September 8 council meeting can be viewed by clicking here.

Mayor Smith announced the news at the beginning of the meeting, where she and the councillors spoke about various issues, including the SPP. Councillors Matt Aronson (District 7), Mary Gallery (District 6), Conrad Peart (District 4), and Jeff Shamie (District 3) confirmed that they will vote in favour of the plan. Councillor Kathleen Kez reiterated her position that the plan should be postponed to the next council, as the plan needs to mature. She was joined by Antonio D’Amico (District 1), who expressed a similar view.

Anitra Bostock (District 5) and Elisabeth Roux (District 2), who announced that she is not seeking re-election, did not comment on the SPP.

Asked for his reaction to the delay, Trent replied: “This delay just adds weight to my observation that it is most unseemly for Council to shove this thing through in the dying days of their mandate.”

Trent is well-versed in public transportation and urban planning, having twice served on the board of the Société de transport de Montréal (STM) and having not owned a car since 1977. In the Q&A below, prepared before the September 8 Council meeting, Trent addressed several points.

Interview with Peter Trent

WM: The mayor and councillors who support the redevelopment plan for the southeast of the city claim that they are obliged by the CMM’s metropolitan plan (PMAD) to maximize development density in areas adjacent to Metro and train stations. Is this a correct assessment?

Trent: They claim that they are obliged to do so by the revised PMAD, approved this year, but not coming into force until 2026. This revision upped the minimum threshold of housing density in areas adjacent to some Metro and train stations. I, however, maintain that the Agglomeration land-use plan, adopted in 2015, will still be in force for at least another 2 years, and it is that plan (and its eventual replacement) that sets out the details of how Westmount can claim exemptions based on its heritage status, as nearly the whole City of Westmount is so classified.

This delay just adds weight to my observation that it is most unseemly for Council to shove this thing through in the dying days of their mandate.

– Peter Trent

Mayor Smith [told the local media] last June, “(…) Is the proposed density a local choice or an imposed requirement? The revised Plan métropolitain d’aménagement et de développement adopted on June 9 by the CMM, imposes a minimum density of 480 dwellings per hectare for hypercentre Transit Oriented Development (TOD) zones, such as the Atwater Metro station area. These aren’t suggestions. They are formal requirements that the agglomeration of Montreal must integrate into its land-use plan.”

The Agglo land-use plan says otherwise. Page 142 (of the online version, page 140 of the print) states: “The following may be excluded from the application of minimum densities” … a sector of exceptional value, or a sector of significant value, as indicated on Map 12 – (Heritage map 12, Page 72). Excepting two small sectors rated of significant value, all of Westmount above the railway right-of-way is made up of sectors of exceptional value.

The Agglo Land-use Plan came into force in 2015 when I was the head of the suburban mayors’ association. We shall have a new one, possibly by 2028, in accordance with the revised Metropolitan Plan. The Agglo Land-use Plan is the only document with details and a map of specific heritage sectors that can be excluded from density thresholds.

The Metropolitan Plan identifies heritage areas only very broadly. The Metropolitan Plan, old and new, lists identical 24 large heritage ensembles (e.g., Centre-Ville, Westmount/NDG). In fact, the Metropolitan Plan gives heritage-designation responsibility to the Agglo and asks the Agglo to select and integrate heritage sectors into its Land-use Plan for them to be protected and enhanced.

WM: You speak of the dictatorship of uniformity. What are the consequences of this?

Trent: The doctrinaire, blanket application of a good idea leads to unintended consequences. The Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal (CMM) planners want to impose an unprecedented concentration of new housing near transit nodes. The CMM covers an area of roughly 4,000 km², dwarfing the area of the communities represented by the Agglomeration, which only covers 500 km².

The CMM decreed TOD “hyper-centre” zones around downtown metro stations. To quote the linguist Eric Partridge, “All words beginning with hyper convey the idea of excess.” In these hyper-centres, the TOD calls for a minimum net housing density of 480 dwellings per hectare (≈200 per acre).

‘In 1995, Westmount adopted a bylaw to protect its built heritage. Bylaw 1305 states: ‘All renovation/new construction to harmonize with existing buildings, respect key architectural characteristics of streetscape of 39 character areas, along with mandatory design guidelines’.’

– Peter Trent

A uniform crop-dusting of X dwellings per hectare is okay for a greenfield site, but not for the City of Westmount, heavy with history and a built heritage. There are few opt-outs that allow for adaptability, except for an important one: the invocation of exclusions in a designated heritage sector.

The minimum density of 480 dwellings per hectare is hard to meet without resorting to high-rise towers. Let me cite two Westmount examples – 4998 de Maisonneuve/St. Catherine, at 18 storeys, has only ≈440 dwellings/hectare, and 4300 de Maisonneuve would have to nearly double its 12-storey height to get to 480.

WM: Can you explain the genesis of Westmount’s Heritage Designation and your role in heritage protection?

Trent: Today’s Council likes to treat me as a man of the past. Let me indulge them. As City councillor and Commissioner of Planning and Redevelopment, in 1983, I joined heritage architect Mark London on the city’s Architectural and Planning Commission, now designated as the PAC.

In 2019, Mark London remembered: “The two of us became a heritage tag team for almost two decades… When Peter became Mayor in 1991, Karin Marks replaced him as Council’s representative on the Commission. She was as supportive as Peter had been of the Commission and of heritage conservation efforts (…). We had not only a local but a national responsibility to take better care of this heritage.”

The Beaupré et Michaud heritage study was completed in February 1988. In 1991, Westmount: A heritage to preserve was published. In 1995, Westmount adopted a bylaw to protect its built heritage. Bylaw 1305 states: “All renovation/new construction to harmonize with existing buildings, respect key architectural characteristics of streetscape of 39 character areas, along with mandatory design guidelines.”

When Parks Canada declared Westmount a district of national historic significance in 2016, Bylaw 1305 played a role. So when the Agglo Land-use Plan was approved in 2015, only Westmount was designated as covered with heritage sectors. This was the fruit of 30 years of work. Today’s Council has shown little interest in our built heritage and history. To map the future, you must know the past.

Instead, we get a kind of nombrilisme temporel (a temporal self-absorption).

This Council seems rather incurious as to how things came to be. Yet Council has a fiduciary responsibility for our built heritage.

‘Today’s Council has shown little interest in our built heritage and history. To map the future, you must know the past.’

– Peter Trent

WM: There is a prevailing view that residential development, particularly large-scale projects, will bring in much-needed revenue to municipalities. You have challenged this in many articles and speeches. How is this reflected in the development plan?

Trent: This vaunted “cash cow” will demand expensive milk in the form of prepaid costs. So if Westmount citizens who live far from the Southeast sector think they’ll be unaffected by this gargantuan development should think again. Why? No one knows how much it will cost to build the new infrastructure (power supply, sewers, and watermains) for this unprecedented scale of construction. And over the long haul, it will cause service demand to increase in proportion to the population increase, and therefore, City spending will increase.

Council naively thinks eventual property-tax revenue will offset these up-front infrastructure costs. But half of the new tax revenue will be rerouted to pay for an increased Agglomeration apportionment stemming from the increase in valuations.

When it comes to property taxes, only multi-million-dollar condos and non-residential development can bring in a net revenue gain after the added cost of new service demand. In Montreal, for example, half of their taxes come from the commercial sector, with little demand for services. Both in Montreal and Westmount, it’s the commercial sector that subsidizes the residential sector.

WM: The City of Montreal, over the past 10 years, has permitted the transformation of the Griffintown area into a vast cluster of residential high-rises without serious planning. How does this relate to the development plan for southeastern Westmount?

Trent: The City of Westmount has spent two years concocting this grandiose scheme for the much-needed revitalization between St Catherine and Dorchester. To plan this Southeast sector redevelopment, council bizarrely chose the firm of Lemay, whose colleagues designed the 40-story behemoth at 1111 Atwater. Naturally, Lemay recommended aping Montreal: build a high-rise forest. In the same way that Griffintown is the result of free-for-all or no urban planning, Le Square Children’s emerged as a jumbled collection of wind-buffeted glass crates of up to 40 storeys. It will not a community make. It had no directing mind. And no school, arena, pool, or playground.

‘Most Westmount urban planners and architects favour dense development for the southeast, but lower-rise, family-friendly development that respects our built heritage.’

– Peter Trent

WM: You have asked aloud, “Do most young families want to live in high-rises at all?” Can you elaborate on this, with a focus on Westmount?

Trent: Westmount is traditionally a family community. We temporarily suffered from the 1960s high-rise delirium when we adopted the “valley concept,” whereby building heights on Westmount’s east and west flanks were dramatically up-zoned to match Montreal’s height limitations. This resulted in Château Maisonneuve on the western border, built in 1965. On the eastern border, we have the now resolutely family-free 33-storey Plaza Tower, constructed in 1967. Some of its 427 units have no permanent residents. Following my speech, a Plaza Tower resident informed me that the situation is being rectified – “As per Cominar, our landlord, they’re in the process of currently converting [the] remaining 23 short-term corporate apartments to regular one-year lease rentals. At one time, they had 33 short-term rental apartments. Cominar says they are filling a need in the market.”

The 1960s high-rise zoning delirium at least produced the elegant, restrained Westmount Square.

WM: What approach should Westmount take to redeveloping the southeast?

Trent: Most Westmount urban planners and architects favour dense development for the southeast, but lower-rise, family-friendly development that respects our built heritage.

In December 2024, a number of us wrote an op-ed in the Gazette regarding Westmount’s Southeast plan:

We propose a counter-vision that creates a sense of place and leans into Westmount’s strengths: its residential charm, human scale, landmark buildings, tree canopies and gardens. This would accommodate families, housed in four-to seven-storey apartment buildings, with three and four bedrooms, terraces and intimately-scaled play spaces at street level. Our vision reconnects this sector into the fabric of our city. (…)

This sector must accommodate a greater density than the area to its south or west. This needs to be calibrated to repair the rupture with the surrounding residential neighbourhood. Higher density in itself cannot be an objective, because it rarely produces welcoming spaces.

In 1963, Westmount expropriated and demolished some 135 houses to widen Dorchester and build high-rises. Today, Council wants to plunk a 20-storey building right up against the Atwater Library. Have we learned nothing? Will the Griffintown-ization of Westmount become this Council’s legacy? I hope not.

‘Council chose a Programme particulier d’urbanisme (PPU)… This extraordinary power demands extra care in execution. It requires flexibility to adjust to the need to repair this scar created in 1963… Only an exemption to the density threshold can provide such flexibility… Unfortunately, the council didn’t ask for it… Citizens were not told during information meetings that the exemption existed.’

– Peter Trent

WM: Do you believe that the mayor and pro-SPP councillors are listening to the concerns of the residents?

Trent: We have an inflexible Council. Council chose a Programme particulier d’urbanisme (PPU), which shelters their project from citizen approval by a referendum. This extraordinary power demands extra care in execution. It requires flexibility to adjust to the need to repair this scar created in 1963 and to attract families to dense, but lower-rise dwellings. Only an exemption to the density threshold can provide such flexibility.

Unfortunately, the council didn’t ask for it. Citizens were not told during information meetings that the exemption existed. At the twilight of their mandate, with the mayor leaving, they are pushing the whole thing through regardless.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of its author and do not reflect the opinions of WestmountMag.ca, its publishers or editors.