I've been trying to figure out the name of the neighborhood I live in. I'm in a weird boundary point. There's no question I live in Montreal. There's no question that the official "neighborhood" I live in is the Plateau. But I thought I lived in the Mile End when I bought the place, while others say "No, I think Mile End does not extend south of Laurier." The problem is, there's no official designation for Mile End -- it exists only in people's minds.
It exists there for a reason. The indisputable center of Mile End -- between Park and St. Laurent, along St. Viatuer and Fairmont, is a cool area. It hosts the 2 kings of bagels in Montreal, amazing Italian cafe's, bars of nightlife, and clubs where the recent Montreal sounds (think Maroon 5 and Arcade Fire, among others) emerged. So, you know, I kinda wanted to live there.
According to the Montreal Gazette, I do. The Gazette (Montreal's largest English language daily) is doing a 3 part piece on Mile End, and today, it defined the area:
Built up in the early 1900s on land vacated by the Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition grounds (Jeanne Mance Park and north to St. Joseph Blvd.), residential Mile End consists largely of two- and three-storey row housing - duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings and a few single-family homes. The traditional boundaries roughly follow the H2T postal code area: Mount Royal Ave. to the south and the CPR railway tracks north of Van Horne to the north, Hutchison St. to the west and St. Denis St. to the east (although some residents claim St. Laurent Blvd. is the limit).
So there it is! I'm in it! woo hoo!
How terrifying? Assuming a good 5% annual appreciation from 1988 (this is not inflation adjusted, after all) it looks to me like we should have had a median price of $352k in 2008... meaning the dropping won't be done before we hit a 30% decline. (Just 12% of that digested, so far.)
