Haleco: The Story of 997 De la Commune

Executive Summary

Every parcel of ground tells a story, but few tell it as plainly as 997 rue de la Commune Ouest. This is a story of three erasures and one reversal. A nineteenth-century industrial block of the faubourg des Récollets stood here until a sweeping Quebec government real estate project of the 1990s swept the old buildings away. The ground then spent a quarter-century as a desolate, asphalt-paved municipal service yard, wedged between the Bonaventure Expressway and the Lachine Canal — the last hole in a healing neighbourhood.

In 2018, the City of Montréal offered the site to the world through the C40 Reinventing Cities competition. Today it holds Haleco: a 21-storey tower with 327 rental units, 65 affordable units and 40 community housing units, built for roughly $200 million. At the parcel level, the gap has finally closed — what stands now roughly equals what the rules allow. The tension that remains is programmatic: whether the circular-economy market hall at its base becomes real civic infrastructure, or just leasing copy.

The Site

Find it on the map and you're standing at a seam. The parcel — 997 (sometimes listed as 995) rue de la Commune Ouest — technically sits in the arrondissement of Ville-Marie, though it's marketed as Griffintown, which lies just across the Bonaventure axis in Le Sud-Ouest. Sociologically, this is the old faubourg des Récollets, where the Cité du Multimédia, Vieux-Montréal and Griffintown all touch. The plot itself is generous by downtown standards: 9,382 square metres, owned by the City of Montréal right up until the competition that transformed it.

The Parcel

The ownership story. The City owned this yard through the 2010s, and even when it agreed to sell, it never quite let go: the C40 competition terms required the buyer to reserve part of the plot so the City could build a garage for its own operations. The municipal function never fully left the ground. The winning consortium tells you who bets on sites like this: Ivanhoé Cambridge — the real estate arm of the Caisse — took an 80 per cent stake, with Cogir Immobilier and Pomerleau at 10 per cent each, and Cogir managing the property once built. Trade press reported the land traded at market value, though the published per-square-metre figure looks like a transcription error; only the act of sale in the Registre foncier would settle the true price.

The origin story. Go back far enough and this is hospital land — part of the fief Nazareth, conceded to Jeanne Mance and the Hôtel-Dieu, with the portion north of the little rivière Saint-Pierre becoming the faubourg des Récollets, named for the gate in the city's fortifications. In 1792, the Irish merchant Thomas McCord acquired the fief from the Hospitalières on a 99-year emphyteutic lease. He understood before almost anyone that Montreal would spill past its walls, and as the fortifications came down after 1804, he sublet the lots at a premium. When the Lachine Canal opened at the foot of the street in 1825, the economic logic locked in: water, warehouses, workshops, and the Irish workforce next door in Griffintown. The names of the specific firms that occupied this block — the names Goad's Atlas and Lovell's Directory would give up — still wait in the archives.

What's built versus what's allowed. The C40 call offered an open program with mixed zoning, and the developers used it: 31,442 square metres in total, including nearly 4,000 square metres of office and about 2,400 square metres of retail, stacked 21 storeys high. That works out to an effective density of roughly 3.35 times the lot area — a full answer to an open question.

What the ground remembered. The constraints here were real and documented. The entire site required major decontamination — a century of industry plus decades of municipal vehicle servicing left their signature in the soil. Crews excavated alongside archaeologists, because this is a registered archaeological site where every artifact had to be catalogued. And during excavation, canal water levels ran high, forcing rigorous water management with pumps and wells. The contamination is itself a historical record: a soil flag names the industries that were there.

The timeline, told in intervals. From the 1700s to 1792, farmland became leasehold city. From 1825 to 1950, the site earned its living from water and rail as canal-driven industrialization filled the sector with nineteenth-century industrial buildings. From 1950 to 1990, the infrastructure that once fed the block began to strangle it: owners abandoned the industrial-era buildings as the sector declined, a fall accelerated by the closing of the Lachine Canal and the construction of the Bonaventure expressway overhead. In the 1980s came the strangest chapter — the City, through SIMPA, bought up buildings and land to create the Quartier des Écluses, a Canary Wharf on the canal. The early-1990s collapse of Montreal's real estate market torpedoed the towers, but not before the nineteenth-century buildings were cleared. Demolition for a future that never arrived. What replaced a century of industry was a municipal service yard.

From 1996 to 2018, the city pivoted to technology and the Cité Multimédia bloomed on every side — while this parcel stayed asphalt. Then, in May 2018, Montréal proposed the De la Commune Service Yard for the C40 Reinventing Cities call for projects. Haleco won the 2018–2019 edition. On June 14, 2022, shovels hit the ground, backed by a $135-million low-cost federal loan. In September 2023, the partners announced an artistic collaboration with painter Marc Séguin for the façades, positioned along the Robert-Bourassa axis and visible from the canal bike paths. Delivery and lease-up followed through 2024 and 2025, with studios starting around $1,449 a month. And in November 2025, the Souk design market chose Haleco's ground-floor hall for its twentieth edition, filling it with some 65 artisans — the market-hall program starting, at last, to function.

The Block

Stories need actors, and this block names them: Ivanhoé Cambridge, Cogir Immobilier, Pomerleau on design-build, ACDF Architecture and L'ŒUF Architectes on design — with Gensler on the original competition team — and Marc Séguin wrapping the whole thing in art.

Every block has a turn, and this one arguably had two. The structural turn was the taming of the Bonaventure: the elevated expressway that helped kill the faubourg was rebuilt at grade as the Robert-Bourassa axis — the very frontage the Séguin artwork now addresses. The procedural turn came in 2018, when the City reclassified its own service yard from operational necessity to an underutilized space to be transformed into a resilient, low-carbon site. The precedent it set matters for every city-owned parcel in the corridor: public land here now trades for maximum public benefit — social housing, carbon targets, ten years of annual reporting to C40 — not maximum price.

The City

The sector sits where three planning geographies meet: the heritage frame of Vieux-Montréal, the employment district of the Cité du Multimédia, and Griffintown's special planning program across the axis. But the operative instrument here was the C40 Réinventer Montréal program itself, whose stated goal was transforming underutilized spaces into resilient, low-carbon sites.

The policy ledger reads both ways. On the upside: a $135-million low-cost federal loan that de-risked the rental pro forma, and transit that keeps improving — Bonaventure station about 1.3 kilometres away, with the métro, the REM and the bike network minutes from the door. On the obligation side: of 367 units, 40 are social or community housing and 77 are affordable, with rents pegged to Montreal average incomes. The sustainability commitments cut both ways too — a LEED Platinum target, connection to a district thermal energy network, energy use 24 per cent below the ASHRAE standard, and 89 per cent of construction and demolition waste diverted from landfill. And one honest headwind: at launch, downtown office vacancy stood at 16.9 per cent, a stated risk on the roughly 43,000 square feet of office space. The project was publicly championed by Mayor Valérie Plante, with Ville-Marie's advisory committee and borough council holding the keys to any future modification.

The Narrative Arc

This ground has been erased three times, and each erasure was somebody's idea of the future.

It began as hospital land — the fief Nazareth, conceded to Jeanne Mance — then passed in 1792 to Thomas McCord, an Irish merchant who understood before almost anyone that Montreal would spill past its walls, and who sublet the faubourg des Récollets lot by lot at a premium. When the Lachine Canal opened at the foot of the street in 1825, the logic of the place locked in: water, warehouses, workshops, and the Irish workforce next door in Griffintown.

What broke it was the twentieth century's own infrastructure. The canal closed to shipping; the Bonaventure expressway landed on concrete stilts at the block's edge; the factories emptied and the parish church of Sainte-Anne came down for lack of parishioners. Then came the strangest chapter: in the late 1980s the city assembled the land for the Quartier des Écluses, a Canary Wharf on the canal. The recession of the early nineties killed the towers but not before the nineteenth-century buildings were cleared. What replaced a century of industry was a municipal garage yard — asphalt, salt, service trucks — while the Cité Multimédia bloomed on every side of it.

The turn came in 2018, when Montréal handed its own service yard to the C40 Reinventing Cities competition and asked the world what it should be. The answer, delivered in 2024 after two years of decontamination, archaeology and canal-water pumping, is Haleco: twenty-one storeys, 367 rental homes including social and affordable units, offices, an urban farm, and a ground-floor hall that hosted the Souk's twentieth edition last November.

The gap here has inverted: for thirty years the ground held almost nothing the rules allowed — now it holds nearly everything they do, and the open question is whether the market hall earns the story told about it.

Open Questions

Every story has loose threads, and honesty about them is what makes the rest credible. The Cadastre du Québec lot number and matricule still need a lookup in the provincial viewer and the assessment roll. The true sale price and date sit in the Registre foncier — the published figure needs the act of sale to correct it. The zone code, maximum height and density under Ville-Marie's Règlement 01-282 live in the arrondissement's PDF grids, and the advisory committee minutes would reveal the project's approval path. Most tantalizing of all: the block's nineteenth-century occupants — the firms demolished in the 1990s — are waiting to be named in the Goad's Atlas sheets and Lovell's Directory at BAnQ. And the provincial contaminated-sites register would document exactly what was in the soil, which is to say, exactly who worked this ground before us.

Sources

This story is built entirely from public records and published reporting: the C40 Reinventing Cities site file and winning-project pages, the 2018 Réinventer Montréal press kit, and project pages from Cogir, Ivanhoé Cambridge, La Caisse, Pomerleau and Panfab. The historical layers draw on the Ville de Montréal's Mémoires des Montréalais encyclopedia, published histories of the faubourg des Récollets, SIMPA and the Quartier des Écluses, and McGill's architecture archive. Press coverage comes from La Presse, RENX, ConstructConnect, Portail Constructo, Voir Vert and wire-service releases, with market data from haleco.ca and rental listing platforms.