Report lays bare toll of pandemic on downtown Montreal
MONTREAL – As a hot spot of the pandemic in Canada, Montreal has seen its downtown core fall on hard times since the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March.
How hard? A new quarterly report, released Thursday by the Urban Development Institute of Quebec and the Montréal Centre-Ville downtown merchants association, offers some clues.
COVID-19 has robbed downtown of most of its 400,000 office workers and 127,000 university students. Only about 12,700 Montreal university students were attending classes in person as of the third quarter, according to the study — a drop of 90 per cent compared with the yearearlier period.
With teleworking now firmly entrenched, many downtown workers are shopping elsewhere. Only 26 per cent per cent of the 1,000 Greater Montreal residents polled for the report said they occasionally or regularly visit the city’s downtown shops or restaurants since the start of the pandemic. Before COVID19, the proportion was 62 per cent.
Tourists also are staying away. Montreal hotels were about 19 per cent full in August, down from 88 per cent in the same month a year ago, according to the study. Per-room revenue plunged 86 per cent, fuelled by a 35-per-cent average decline in room rates.
As of late August, 26 per cent of downtown shops and restaurants in central Montreal were either temporarily or permanently closed, the study also shows. Fifty-three per cent of service businesses located in the vicinity of office towers and Central Station have temporarily closed their doors, while a further one per cent shut down permanently.
Though many downtown businesses have seen revenue plummet by as much as 80 per cent, “they are able to survive nonetheless,” Emile Roux, executive director of Montréal Centre-Ville, said in a telephone interview. “So far at least, we’ve not witnessed the wave of bankruptcies that we were expecting. The holiday period will be crucial. If people are still confined and shoppers aren’t there, we could see many more permanent closures.”
Still, the report does offer some encouraging data. At 11.5 per cent in the third quarter, downtown office vacancy rates remain relatively low by historical standards, said Roux.
“Although many employees are teleworking, companies are staying downtown and keeping their offices,” he said. “The raison d’être of downtown offices remains.”
How enthusiastic will workers be to return downtown once the COVID-19 health scare has dissipated? Maybe not that much.
Seventy-five per cent of city centre workers polled for the study said they want to continue teleworking at least half of the week after the pandemic. Only two per cent said they want to go back to the office full time.