Concerns about Royalmount go beyond traffic

The project could well be a short-term success but a long-term failure

There’s nothing wrong with the sprawling, prefab consumerist ode known as DIX30. Honestly.

In fact, the shopping centre — or “lifestyle centre,” as its coy marketers call it — offers its customers an enticing choice. You can either brave downtown traffic, fight for downtown parking then hustle through downtown crowds, or you can hop in your car and get the suburban approximation of the downtown experience, complete with acres of free parking and seemingly mile-wide streets.

More important, DIX30 is located beyond Montreal city limits in Brossard, separated from us by an area code and roughly 3.5 kilometres of fast-moving river. Their problems aren’t ours, and vice versa. The same can’t be said for Royalmount, the planned “lifestyle centre” that currently exists only on paper and in the nightmares of the city’s urban planners.

Much has been written about the roughly four-million-square-foot behemoth slated to be plunked onto the industrial scrapes of T.M.R. by 2022. The city of Montreal’s own study says it will increase the number of cars on the already overburdened Décarie interchange by nearly 20 per cent and cannibalize clientele from nearby shopping centres.

St-Laurent borough Mayor Alan de Sousa called the project “permanent, planned traffic chaos” and says he dreads the day when his borough streets become de facto shortcuts for car-centric shoppers. Carbonleo disputed it all. The Royalmount developer says the project will “reconnect people to each other, and create memories in a uniquely designed space.” There will also be water slides.

Yet Royalmount’s potential problems extend beyond traffic snafus. And unlike DIX30, whose cacophony belongs only to the city of Brossard, Royalmount is anchored in Montreal. Its problems will be our problems. And there is a distinct possibility that Royalmount will be a short-term success but a long-term failure.

Last year was a particularly cruel year for retail. Denim chain Jean Machine and Town Shoes both recently shuttered their doors. Lowes and Rona closed 31 outlets across the country, while J Crew closed stores in Toronto, Ottawa and Calgary. Mall staples, including Gap, Banana Republic and Victoria’s Secret, also closed stores. Sears, Nine West, Rockport and Brookstone all filed for bankruptcy protection this year.

The vast majority of these stores lived in shopping malls. That they have died there underscores a bigger issue about shopping malls. Namely, they are dying. In 2018, mall vacancies hit a seven-year high in the U.S., according to the Wall Street Journal. This, despite a relatively robust American economy.

Part of the reason, of course, is the near-instantaneous online ubiquity of Amazon, whose couch-based shopping model has made many bricks-and-mortar shops redundant. But Jeff Bezos isn’t the only culprit behind the mall’s demise. As a country, Canada has a lot of retail space: more than double the U.K.’s 44 square metres per citizen, according to the Shopping Centre Council of Australia.

For decades, big names like Ikea and Walmart have soaked up much of this square footage. Yet both and many others have been downsizing as of late, turning instead to stores with smaller footprints to showcase their wares while shifting much of its sales and inventory to the internet. It’s the retail equivalent of moving your computer hard drive to the cloud. Needless to say, this “small box” trend is anathema to the viability of four-million-square-foot shopping centres.

In the short term, anyway, Royalmount is an alluring spectacle. It will be a ready-made version of downtown wedged into the confluence of two major traffic arteries. Carbonleo says the project will conjure an estimated $45 million in yearly tax revenue. There will be water slides.

Yet unlike DIX30, it will be our problem when those arteries inevitably become all the more clogged, and if those tax dollars dwindle because the next generation of shoppers do their bidding via their fingers or in smaller stores, as the demographics suggest. We have one suburban downtown already. We don’t need another.