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In the past, working-age immigrant families in Canada's large urban centres had higher home-ownership rates than the Canadian-born. Over the past 20 years, however, this advantage has reversed, due jointly to a drop in immigrant rates and a rise in the popularity of home-ownership among the Canadian-born. This paper assesses the efficacy of a fairly standard microeconomic consumer choice model, which includes indicators for age, income, education, family type and immigrant characteristics, plus several interactions with time, to explain these changes. It is found that the standard model almost completely explains the immigrant home-ownership advantage in 1981, as well as the rise in home-ownership rates over time among the Canadian-born. Even after accounting for the well-known decline in immigrant economic fortunes, however, it is shown that only about half of the 1981–2001 immigrant change in home-ownership rates is explained by the standard model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the recent urban literature on suburban employment centres has neglected the role of high-order services, perhaps the principal component of 'edge cities', in the creation of the evolving multinucleated metropolitan structure. This paper specifically explores the role of high-order services in this process. We use employment by place-of-work data at the census-tract level to examine the changing intrametropolitan geography of employment in four finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) services and eight business services in the Montreal area over the period 1981–96. We find evidence of central business district (CBD) decline in relative, but not absolute, terms. The resulting decentralisation has clearly assumed the form of polycentricity rather than of generalised dispersion. In spite of recent advances in telecommunications technologies, agglomeration economies continue to exert an important impact upon intrametropolitan location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from the 1996 Canadian census to examine and measure the spatial structure and intensity of urban deprivation in Montreal. Urban deprivation emerged as an important theme in urban studies and urban geography during the 1990s. Since the early 1980s, the Montreal urban area, particularly the Island of Montreal, has experienced an increase in urban social problems, brought on largely by economic restructuring, recessions and the out-migration of residents and businesses to suburban communities. Twenty indicators of urban deprivation are drawn from the census and analysed by way of a principal components analysis first to identify the main types of deprivation in the city and then to measure its intensity. In the process, a general deprivation index (GDI) is devised which can be applied to study the spatial aspects of this phenomenon in other Canadian cities. The study identified six main types of deprivation in the city and found that they were most visible on the Island of Montreal, especially in the central and eastern parts. Additionally, it found that urban deprivation in not confined to the inner city, as several of the most severely deprived neighbourhoods are located outside the central city and even in the off-Island suburbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the relationship between gentrification and the transport mode selected for the journey to work. A review of surveys, ethnographies and electoral records shows a liberal and anti-suburban ideology associated with gentrification, including endorsement of sustainability and the public household. Consequently, one would expect to find non-automobile transport prevailing in gentrified districts. Data secured from the Census of Canada permit this proposition to be examined for the central cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The results show some complexity, due in part to divisions internal to gentrified neighbourhoods. The most robust results reveal an overrepresentation of cycling to work in gentrified districts and, surprisingly in light of a putative left-liberal ideology, an underutilisation of public transport compared with other districts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the residents of public housing, whose mobility is often reduced due to their precarious economic situation and their stage in the life cycle, the accessibility of services and facilities is a fundamental concern. Moreover, in Montréal, public housing is dispersed throughout the city. Accessibility thus varies greatly from one building to the next. The aims of this study are first to evaluate the accessibility of various urban resources using spatial data analysis in geographical information systems and then to develop an indicator of the accessibility of services and facilities for each public housing project using multivariate data analysis. The final results show that there are eight sub-types of landscape facilities around public housing buildings. Overall, half of the residents of public housing buildings have very good or good accessibility to services and facilities. Most of these residents live in public housing in some of the central or relatively central districts. On the other hand, for 45 per cent of public housing residents, there is a low level of access and 5 per cent have very limited service accessibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a comparative analysis of neighbourhood renewal processes in Brussels and Montreal based on a typology of such processes wherein gentrification is precisely delimited. In this way, it seeks to break with the extensive use of a chaotic conception of gentrification referring to the classic stage model when dealing with the geographical diversity of neighbourhood renewal, within or between cities. In both Brussels and Montreal, the gentrification concept only adequatly describes the upward movement of very restricted parts of the inner city, while neighbourhood renewal in general more typically comprises marginal gentrification, upgrading and incumbent upgrading. Evidence drawn from the case studies suggests that each of these processes is relevant on its own--i.e. linked to a particular set of causal factors--rather than composing basically transitional states within a step-by-step progression towards a common gentrified fate. Empirical results achieved in Brussels and Montreal suggest that a typology such as the one implemented in this article could be used further in wider research aimed at building a geography of neighbourhood renewal throughout Western cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]