Tracy Lindeman
Citylab
In his 65 years, Denis Bédard has watched a city grow up around his Quebec City family farm.
Beauport used to be a rural area home to dozens of vegetable farmers. “There was no urbanization at all,” says Bédard, owner of Ferme Bédard et Blouin. “The 1960s is when it all started.”
That’s when developers began snapping up lands owned by aging farmers. In the decades that followed, Quebec City sprawled into Beauport. More buildings sprang up. Traffic clogged the main street. The number of farms dwindled. But there were always a few holdouts that anchored the area in its agricultural roots, chief among them a congregation of nuns called les Soeurs de la Charité (Sisters of Charity). The sisters owned 500 acres of land that, for more than 100 years, was used primarily for grain and seed production.
That is, until 2014, when the nuns sold their land for an astronomical CDN $39 million (plus $14 million in built-in interest) to Michel Dallaire, a private developer who intends to use part of the land to build 6,500 housing units—many of them single-family homes and townhouses. The city, which is in the process of creating a new urban development plan, has endorsed the Beauport project and is working with Dallaire’s company, Groupe Dallaire, to make it happen.
“That was the trigger,” says Monique Gagnon, spokesperson for Voix Citoyenne (“Citizens’ Voice”), a grassroots advocacy group opposed to housing development on these lands. The city has since used the Dallaire opportunity to request the dezoning of at least 1,000 acres of agricultural land in Beauport and another 400 acres west of the city, in St-Augustin, in order to grow its urban perimeter.
Beauport ‘a hole that must be filled’
Quebec City, metro population 800,000, believes that it will need an additional 28,200 households between now and 2036 if it wants to keep pace with divorce rates and immigration. This oft-cited figure is fundamental to the reasoning for the Beauport project—but it’s only part of the story.
With 382,000 existing housing units, Quebec City actually has an oversupply of housing—particularly condos—which has caused real estate prices to stagnate in recent years. It also has a low birth rate and an aging population. “We’re probably at the end of strong growth, and are probably going toward stagnation or small growth unless there’s massive immigration,” says Érick Rivard, an architect, urban designer, and university professor based in Quebec City.
With a population density of just 608 people per-square-mile, the city also has a notable sprawl problem (for reference, New York City has a density of 27,000 people per-square-mile). The city’s proposed urban development plan looks to maintain this land-use ratio, and it has every incentive to do so. Because the city gets most of its money from property taxes, the more high-value real estate development it greenlights the easier it is to fill its coffers.
La suite
