By ALLISON LAMPERT, THE GAZETTE

MONTREAL — In the early 1930s, the Marché Saint-Jacques was revived as a red brick building in the Art Deco style, generating construction jobs and spinoffs for working-class Montreal residents during the depression.

Now five years after the Marché’s controversial sale to a private developer, the planned reinvention of Montreal’s oldest public market is once again being hailed as a force for economic revival — only this time, what’s under construction are new condos.

On Tuesday, the developer that owns the Marché Saint-Jacques at the corner of Amherst and Ontario Sts. publicized its $10 million plan to build 14 townhouses and 18 condos on the upper floors of the commercial building, which is to continue operating a ground-floor market. Developer Europa would need to add a fourth floor to accommodate the 32 housing units, which range from $229,000 to $599,000.

The developer has asked for approval from the city of Montreal and the Ville Marie borough to increase the height of the building.

A spokesperson for Europa president Jean-Pierre Houle declined to comment on the project before Tuesday.

Development groups say the new condos are essential to keeping the market’s ground-floor commercial rents affordable for merchants — and by extension, food prices for customers.

“The model is really interesting,” said Vanessa Sorin of the Corporation de développement économique communautaire (CDEC) Centre-Sud-Plateau, a publicly-funded group that supports community-based economic development and job creation. “The Marché Saint-Jacques as a destination would offer affordable produce for locals, while attracting shoppers from elsewhere.”

The Marché project comes at a time when Montreal’s traditional working class neighbourhoods like Griffintown, Saint-Henri and Hochelaga-Maisonneuve are being rapidly transformed with the influx of young professionals, following several years of record, or near-record condo building in greater Montreal. In some areas, brew pubs and gourmet bakeries are opening on streets once openly carved up as turfs by drug-dealers.

But like other condo projects, the Marché development has sparked concerns that the growing number of high-end homes will inflate real estate prices, pushing out existing residents in a neighbourhood where the average household earns just over $39,000 a year. While Montreal has not experienced the same extreme cases of gentrification as in large cities like New York, London or Paris, lawmakers still have a general responsibility to protect residents from being displaced, said Pierre Gauthier, an urban planning professor at Concordia University.