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adammongrain.bsky.social
Adam Mongrain
@adammongrain.bsky.social
2.1K followers 3K following 900 posts
Director - Housing policy | Directeur - Habitation, Vivre en Ville
Montréal, Québec
EN/FR
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adammongrain.bsky.social
Can’t claim to be the movement but we do our level best.
November 8, 2025 at 4:42 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
This is why we make a point of spelling this out very plainly every time we talk about climate and housing policies.
But does protection alone make a living environment sustainable? Clearly not. As a society, the point of adopting sustainability policies is inevitably to ensure that we can sustain, and even expand, our current activities. If the point were to free the planet entirely from the burden of humankind, these policies would advocate ending human society altogether. It logically follows that we must consider both the environment and humankind when reflecting on sustainability.
November 7, 2025 at 7:53 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
Reminded of @mtsw.bsky.social’s point about some leftist naivety on the gilets jaunes - that the optics of popular uprising manage to convince people that it is a proletarian revolution in essence.
The events narrated in Making also took place during a long and controversial war, and Thompson discusses at length the phenomenon of the “‘Church and King’ mob”—groups of prowar, anti-radical thugs who terrorized dissidents. Although they gave the appearance of reflecting the organic nationalism of the people, sometimes even targeting wealthy individuals, Thompson insists they must be understood as simply an arm of those in power. A “Church and King” mob might be composed of thick-necked men who work with their hands; this does not make it a working-class revolution.
November 2, 2025 at 2:39 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
Your thoughts on social rents have been very useful. It's not explicitly in the text but we did try to account for how social positioning and social rent extraction were things we needed to grapple with to pitch a convincing story to curious but unaware parties.
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THESE DOORS The best writing on housing isn’t really about the housing itself. It’s about the freedom to choose where and how we live, to belong to a community, and to pursue the lives we dream of for ourselves. It inspires agency, hope, and ambition. It’s also about our relationships with our environment and with one another; it brings to light what we haven’t always had, and what we might still gain. What these discussions share is the understanding that housing and real estate are different concepts. They recognize that beyond wood and brick, what’s truly at the heart of our debates on housing is the space we allow ourselves, the space we claim, and the space we wish to inhabit. What drives us in striving to solve the housing crisis is not concern for the health of the housing stock, it’s the dream of a fairer and more equitable system. The real goal is to create conditions for everyone to thrive, flourish, and pursue happiness. It’s in our pursuit for dignity and freedom that we’ll find the courage to reject the crisis we’ve been handed down and at last demand what we are all owed. By way of conclusion, we want to emphasize that opening these doors is both a collective effort and an individual one. As citizens, voters, colleagues, and even as neighbours, we are agents of change: our task is to decide where we can personally make a difference. The doors that open onto sustainable affordability are held closed by a number of locks: governance challenges, technology gaps, outdated regulations, economic constraints, and a lack of solidarity. But each and every one of us holds a key. We need to start opening these doors—one person at a time, until we’re all holding them open together—and meet each other on the other side.
October 30, 2025 at 12:14 AM
adammongrain.bsky.social
I have a lot of big feelings about this. I got the housing bug around 2011, at a time where the relative affordability of Québec was taken for granted. At the time, I was reading a bunch of nascent YIMBY stuff from the US and thought that the basic observations held true for the cities here.
A graph detailing to progression of single family home prices in the province of Québec, with a general increase of +104% between 2009 and 2023.
October 29, 2025 at 10:50 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
City lights
Picture of a sunset over the Villeray neighborhood in Montreal
October 29, 2025 at 10:06 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
@alexbaca.bsky.social, to a room full of planners in 2021: you are planning with your own selves in mind

Four years later, we finally got it in writing
A picture of a page. The last sentences are the highlight: lLnd use planning is a creative exercise: we envision and design environments in which we see ourselves-and which inevitably reflect our own values and sensibilities. It simply comes with the territory.
October 15, 2025 at 4:56 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
This book *can* kill, apparently.
The cover of "Governing Canada - A Guide to the Tradecraft of Politics" by Michael Wernick.
October 8, 2025 at 4:51 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
It is an important piece. Again this is stuff I already believe but we try to anchor all of our advocacy around the idea of residential mobility (instead of affordability) because the point of an ideal, affordable residential stock would be to let people choose where and how they live.
A screen capture of a part of the linked article. It reads: "The seemingly clear barrier between putting down roots and moving around suddenly becomes very difficult to pin down when you reframe this all a little bit. Localism might not have very much to do with staying in place. Moving forms, spreads, and grows cultures, ideas, and groups. And crucially, as Fong and Appelbaum note, these communities that form as a result of mobility also enhance places for those who stay. Those who move are not doing so at the expense of the communities they leave behind. When all’s said and done, such mobility is to the benefit of those receiving and losing residents. Suppressing the movement of people can also backfire: the housing/mobility crisis also makes it difficult for many people to stay in communities and put down roots, because of high housing costs. Ironically, making mobility easier will also make sticking around easier." The last two sentences are highlighted.
October 6, 2025 at 7:32 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
Twitter gets a lot of rightfully deserved scorn for its crypto scammers but the true believers on LinkedIn are, in some interesting ways, a thousand times more annoying
Comment from Lee Feldman on LinkedIn: Bitcoin replaces houses as the primary pristine asset/ store of value. Houses return to their natural price based on utility value. People can afford them and live in them.
September 25, 2025 at 3:35 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
I reread @lioneltrolling.bsky.social's We Don't Live In A Society something like 20 times, because it so rightly sees the normalization of spontaneous violence as a reaction to "the shame of being perceived", and I wonder openly to what extent we choose to kill, or let die, out of shame.
We’re far from the myth of the frontiersman, the minuteman, the cowboy, the gunslinger, which as heroic images always were covering up more murderous realities, but at least were attractive ideals of self-reliance or communal self-defense. In place of self-reliance, we now have only the nightmare obverse of the life of a solitary individual: paranoia, solipsism, selfishness, seeing in every shadow a conspiracy against the self. A “they” out there, someone you have to get before they get you, or someone who just isn’t really a human being to you anymore. Because what’s a human being, anyway? For that notion to exist you have to recognize others and be recognized, to live in a community. People? They are just something that angers you, that thwarts you, humiliates you, so why not lash out? Kill them, then yourself—anything to break the unbearable shame of being perceived. Arming the public has not created heroic Beowulfs, ready to do selfless deeds, but so many Grendels, driven mad by the sounds of conviviality, stealing into our halls from the swamps, and shedding blood to avenge the offense done to them by basic humanity.
September 24, 2025 at 5:20 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
But the part that stuck with me is not the broader argument about the subway being safe and cool. It's the short paragraph about how the experience of being homeless in public transit is so much worse for the homeless people than the people sharing space with them.
There are homeless people on the subway. They are there because they have no homes. Some of them are mentally ill. If you ride the subway a lot, it is possible that you will see a homeless person who does not smell good sleeping on a train. It is possible that you will see a mentally ill person ranting and raving. This may make you uncomfortable. But imagine how they feel. Not only are they homeless, but they are also in need of mental health treatment, and they don’t have it, and instead they are consigned to riding a train all day, where people constantly move away from them and view them with disgust. An awful fate.
September 24, 2025 at 5:20 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
Always neat to get a real good opportunity to reup @resnikoff.bsky.social's insights.

www.thenation.com/article/soci...
Selected text from the linked article: It may, at first glance, seem like productive firms would, in contrast to rentier capital, uniformly support land-use deregulation so they would have more opportunities to build. But many builders are either indifferent to pro-housing reforms or actively opposed to them. (One recent example: the president of San Francisco’s Residential Builders Association saying, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, “San Francisco does not have a zoning problem.”) That is because developers tend to specialize: Land-use reforms that encourage the creation of more infill apartment buildings do little to help the builders of sprawling single-family subdivisions, and may in fact hurt their bottom line by creating a release valve for pent-up housing demand.
September 9, 2025 at 3:22 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
I have found happiness in the city that my younger self could not have imagined. Literally, ontologically outside the realm of imagination.
A photo of OP’s POV overlooking a Montreal alley behind an apartment on the third floor.
August 25, 2025 at 11:15 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
End of August porch beer. I don’t know if people where there is no winter know what it is to hang on to t-shirt weather like Indiana Jones falling off the cliff.
August 25, 2025 at 11:10 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
For instance I play a lot of badminton and I take it pretty seriously. Here is me in my super fresh team t-shirt at last season’s interclub championship.
A picture of OP from the back on a badminton court. The t-shirt reads « A. MONGRAIN - BAM! »
August 25, 2025 at 12:54 AM
adammongrain.bsky.social
If you can’t read French, good for you. It’s still time to look away!

This is a bit of news about a kid’s soccer team being DQ’d from a major tournament because parents were asking 9 and 10 year old girls to prove they were girls by pulling down their pants.

www.lapresse.ca/sports/socce...
A screencap from the link detailing how parents at a children’s soccer tournament tried to have 9 or 10 year old girls to prove they were girls.
August 25, 2025 at 12:54 AM
adammongrain.bsky.social
there’s shitty food and then there’s
A sign for a restaurant special that reads « 2 ass shawarma & shish taouk for $30.99 »
August 11, 2025 at 1:51 AM
adammongrain.bsky.social
tell me more
A plaque on a door that reads ASS BASEBALL AMATEUR JARRY
July 16, 2025 at 5:24 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
I spent a week in Natashquan and to my infinite surprise and delight, I would recommend it.
A map of Québec that shows the location of Natashquan. It is very remote.
July 4, 2025 at 8:34 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
I found this reaction image years ago under Ben's first post about this sandwich, and I believe it is the right one.
A blurred image of a cat making a distressed and disgusted expression.
July 4, 2025 at 6:12 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
The CBC report is using the same StatCan data packages as censusmapper, the AI tool is for analyzing satellite images.

ici.radio-canada.ca/info/codesou...
July 2, 2025 at 4:30 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
And as a final thought: using the same methods to visualize pop growth in other Canadian metros, we see the same suburbanization patterns as the one in Montreal. Here is Toronto. But would you say that Toronto is not growing or has lower demand in its core than it did 50 years ago?
A visual representation of population growth in the Toronto metro. We see that almost all of the population growth has been concentrated at the fringes, with almost no growth happening in the urban core.
July 2, 2025 at 4:13 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
I think there are a bunch of things going on, it's probably too dynamic to ascribe the results to one or two big structural element (migration and/or zoning) but there is a bunch of indicators that the population of Montreal proper is growing, and that it would grow more if housing supply grew.
A screen capture of an article the news outlet le Devoir. The title reads "record demographic growth in the province of Québec, particularly in Montreal" in French.
July 2, 2025 at 4:07 PM
adammongrain.bsky.social
Like if you look at this representation of pop growth between 2000 and 2020 in the Montreal metro, are you seeing a lack of the demand for the core or zoning barriers?

ici.radio-canada.ca/info/2022/03...
An image of where population growth was concentrated in the Montreal region between 2000 and 2020. Almost all of the growth happened outside of already urbanized areas.
July 2, 2025 at 3:48 PM