by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

This week I was standing in a busy, muddy area known as Centropolis.

I really shouldn't use that preposterous title Laval is hoping people call its downtown.

For those who didn't know that such a thing as downtown Laval existed, it's apparently just behind the spaceship off Highway 15. Martin Sacksner claims that his area behind the Cosmodome, where he's building 56 condos, is "The Laval equivalent of Stanley and Ste-Catherine." He brings me to see the $260,000, seventh-floor unit overlooking the mountain on the horizon. You can see the Oratory. The surroundings are shiny and new. It's very posh.

For whatever reason, Montrealers - particularly francophone professionals - are moving in droves to places like this. They can't get off the island of Montreal fast enough. In a worried report, Université de Montréal demographer Marc Termote suggests that so many francophones are moving there that by 2021 allophones and anglophones will combine to form the majority of Montreal's population.

Yet just a few years back nobody wanted to live in Centropolis. Now it's like the next freakin' Plateau.

The provincial government's Caisse de Dépôt paid around $3-mil to build 28 residential units at this spot in 1996.

"They had a whole master plan of residential and commercial [development], and they tried building the first phase but they blew their brains out," says Sacksner, meaning that the project flopped.

Three years later Sacksner snapped it up for about half that price and built two recently completed buildings on the surrounding land.

It's a stone's throw from Carrefour Laval, which has been massively renovated. "It's walking distance to high-end shopping, a sushi shop, a restaurant and nightclub. And it's cheaper to live here," he says. "Taxes are a fraction of elsewhere and homes here are a better product at a cheaper price."

Sacksner, 35, reassures me that the metro station has helped the hype. It's going to be built near to Centropolis, although he doesn't know exactly where. But, he says, "The people who are buying basically have two cars and they drive to work and will never use the metro."

He looks to net a mil or two from his $10-million development, which is a big step up from when he started out "with nothing," paying $11,000 per unit for a motel-style building in Montreal's east end where tenants paid $200 a month.

He now owns and collects rent on 600 apartments in and around Montreal, many of the low-rent variety, a fact that would make his father "spin in his grave. He was leader of Canada's largest tenants' group," laughs Sacksner.

It's not always been easy for a guy in a yarmulke. "One time I was cleaning out this apartment of a young woman evicted for not paying her rent and I found a note in the oven saying, ‘This is where the Jews belong.' I get that sort of thing a lot," says Sacksner, whose cheerful tone barely changes while telling it.

Sacksner is also erecting a 28-unit condo project across from the CBC tower. But he seems fixated on his part in inventing Centropolis.

Cities are born and grow largely according to the hype they can sustain. Developers hypnotize the public with manic urban utopianism and soon, a city is born.

If you're sick of worrying about bike paths, recycling, traffic calming, needle exchanges and other Montreal problems, just get a car and move north. No need to be ashamed of your lack of social conscience. Up here you'd be considered an oddball if you didn't take your car to the corner store.

In Montreal they're trying to discourage parking. In Laval parking is bigger than religion, and it's free and plentiful.

Car culture and suburbia might be environmentally reprehensible but sometimes good things come of bad tendencies, just as bad results can come of the best of intentions.

Montreal and its fast-growing competitor to the north are going in opposite directions. We're still ahead, but what a lot of us assume is still a scrubland of aluminum siding, truck stops and toothless strippers might catch up if we don't watch out.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca