The Future Starts Now

With the time line drawing short for any decisions that could be made BEFORE the upcoming election it is almost impossible to nail down our political leaders on what they see the Halifax of the future.

HRM By Design has been working diligently to come up with a community driven conceptual design for the Halifax core. That conceptual design is to be revealed tonight in a public consultation at the World Trade & Convention Center. One of the most objective articles that I’ve seen was written by Trevor Adams at Halifax Magazine and hit the road this past weekend. I’ve included the article for your information & reading pleasure, as well I would encourage you to visit Halifax Magazine’s site and check out the rest of their publication.

April / May 2008

Halifax’s citizens have a vision for the future — but how do we get there?

Trevor Adams
PHOTO: James Ingram

Halifax is destined for great things, well on its way to becoming a world-class centre of trade, commerce and culture. If you’re smart, you’ll build your future here!

Halifax is doomed, a has-been city, geographically isolated and under-populated, saddled with crumbling infrastructure that’s far too expensive to fix. If you’re smart, you’ll join the golden horde in Alberta before it’s too late!

Halifax is fine just the way it is.There’s no reason to change anything. New buildings would blight the downtown. Just leave it alone. If you’re smart, you can see that development threatens our heritage!

THEY MAY BE EXTREME, but you can sum up most arguments about Halifax’s future in one of those three viewpoints, and usually the latter two. And that drives Fred Morley nuts. He’s the chief economist and senior vice-president with the Greater Halifax Partnership, the organization responsible for spurring economic development in the city. When asked about the city’s infamous fear of change, he laughs wearily, leans back in his chair and rubs the bridge of his nose as if he’s trying to ward off a migraine. He chooses his words carefully. “You get a sense from traditional media, elected leaders and a small-but-vocal minority that people aren’t crazy about growth in this city,” he says, but then he grins, picking up a sheaf of papers off his desk. “But we know otherwise now.” He’s excited because he and his colleagues finally have proof that there’s a real appetite for growth and development in Halifax. Recently, the Partnership worked with Bristol Omnifacts Research for a far-reaching survey of residents’ attitudes towards growth and development. (For a breakdown of the results, see the tables on page 36).

The results fly in the face of Halifax’s can’t-do stereotype. “The most important thing we’ve learned is that people in every part of Halifax buy into the notion that economic growth is important for a vital city,”Morley says. “Most people in Halifax understand the need for growth.” And that’s a pleasant surprise for Morley and his colleagues. “I wasn’t really expecting to hear that,” he adds. “You buy into those perceptions sometimes.” And it comes at a key time, as the city reaches the final stage of its HRM by Design process, a municipal urban design study aiming to chart a clear path for the city’s growth. Municipal councillor Dawn Sloane represents the downtown, serves on the HRM Urban Design Task Force and has been a big booster of the project, lauding it as a necessary step for securing Halifax’s future. “We have to start acting like a bigger city,” she says. “When you’re talking about heritage versus growth, other cities, like Dublin, have managed to grow without losing their heritage or getting stalled in these debates.” She’s seen the appetite for growth firsthand. “From what I’ve gathered at public meetings, the will is there,” she says. “Our meetings on these subjects have been the city’s biggest public meetings ever—hundreds of people coming out when we may have gotten a couple dozen in the past. Common residents want mixed neighbourhoods, they want new amenities, they want to be more urbanistic.”And from Morley’s perspective, this information is most useful because it gives Sloane and her colleagues the tools to start building the city they know citizens want. “This gives us an opportunity to put the story straight,” he says “We’ve never had that before.This should inform decision-making. This helps us move forward as a community. It really blows away the old ideas about growth.”

WHAT THEY’VE LEARNED
Some of the most interesting lessons of the survey come from the regional breakdown. “Residents of South End Halifax feel strongest about the importance of growth,” Morley says. “But at public meetings, you might get the opposite impression.” He feels that a vocal minority of anti-development activists often dominate the discussion at those meetings. Equally interesting, the numbers indicate that the people most hesitant about downtown development have the smallest stake in it. “People most resistant to tall buildings downtown live in Sackville, Fall River, Tantallon and those areas,” he explains. “The people who don’t want growth downtown also aren’t coming here on a daily basis. The people most affected by tall buildings want them.The suburbs want growth outside downtown but not in their suburban area. It’s a bit of the NIMBY [Not In My Backyard] syndrome you hear about in the media.”

That’s a surprising revelation. “I wouldn’t have bet that the South End would support change at the rate it seems to,” Morley says. “I wouldn’t have thought that the people least affected by growth would be the most resistant, either.” He thinks that can be attributed to the fact that many suburban dwellers come from the rural areas of the Maritimes, and just aren’t partial to urbanized settings.

That information is useful for municipal leaders because any growth strategy is likely to have ripple effects all over the city. “Our goal is to make the city more neighbourhood friendly,” Sloane says. “Each neighbourhood of the city should have everything you need—places to live, to work, to shop, to play.” She isn’t exactly impartial (after all, the downtown is her constituency), but Sloane wants downtown growth to be a priority for Halifax. “The heart of our city drives the whole region—it has economic power and it’s what people, no matter where in HRM they live, take pride in,” she says. “Everyone feels like part of the downtown. It’s our downtown. People want to take pride in that again. It will help the city on the economic side and the quality of-life side.”

THE CASE FOR GROWTH
New office buildings downtown are an urgent need. “The timing is right,”Morley says. “The financial services sector has discovered Halifax and our labour force and they want to locate here. This is a big economic opportunity. But pretty soon we’re going to hit a crunch. Demand for space is increasing and supply needs to respond or the opportunities will go elsewhere.” Sloane agrees. “We have to look at growth areas like the financial industry and make sure we can accommodate it,” she says.

But that hasn’t happened so far. “there hasn’t been growth in downtown office space for some time,” Morley says. “But demand has picked up.” The numbers bear him out. The study inventoried the city’s available office space, for both private and publicly controlled sites, projecting the maximum capacity the city could develop in the next decade.

According to the study, Halifax’s business district currently has an office inventory of about 4.5 million square feet. Assuming a modest three percent growth rate (the rate has been 3.93 per cent over the last 50 years), the city will need an additional 1.6 million square feet in the business district alone over the next decade. The inventory’s conclusion is stark: “We are massively short of growth capacity…”

The situation isn’t hopeless, though. There are plenty of areas ripe for development “There are so many opportunities in the downtown core,” Sloane says. “A lot of people—including HRM and the province—are sitting on vacant land. If we did something with the Cogswell Interchange, we could go up to 27 storeys. There are lots of opportunities to grow.”

THE DELAYS
With proven need and available land, why hasn’t the downtown developed faster? Sloane attributes the glacial pace of development to a philosophical impasse. “I hate to use the term fundamentalist but really there are fundamentalists on both sides,” she says. “You have the side that wants more restrictions and those who want less and often when they collide, it’s hard to get anything done quickly.”

The Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia is often at the centre of those discussions. It’ a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the province’s built heritage. But president Phil Pacey doesn’t feel his organization is anti-development. “People like to set us up as a straw man on this but we’re really not anti-development,” he says. “Generally speaking, we’re in favour of development that uses heritage buildings effectively.Our focus is on the preservation of heritage buildings, so development can be problematic if it interferes with historic assets such as views from the Citadel to the harbour. This push for high buildings isn’ desirable—t’ sort of a throwback to the mistakes of the past.”

He wants to emphasize, however, that he’s not calling for a wholesale prohibition on development. “We are in favour of compatible in-fill buildings,” Pacey says. “We’re in favour of many new developments—Salter’s Gate, for example… the Historic Properties are another good example of what can be done. Heritage is also the core of Argyle Street and the Brewery Market is a good example of an area that’s working well.”

Despite those successes, he feels the city has botched key areas. “The Maritime Centre and Scotia Square were urban design failures,” Pacey says. “What we don’t want is a downtown with a few high buildings separated by vacant lots.” Ironically, that’s exactly the downtown Morley feels we’re heading towards, if something doesn’t change. “I’m reminded of a quote from Walt Disney,” he muses. “He said that change is inevitable but growth is optional. And that’s what we’ve experienced. The peninsula hasn’t grown but it has changed. We have more vacant lots, less heritage. And we have to do something now.”

THE NEXT STEP
Sloane argues that a fair and consistent process for designers, with clear rules that encourage the development of beautiful buildings, would solve a lot of problems. “We need an even playing field,” she says. “The developers are saying ‘just tell us what we need to do.’ Everyone wants buildings that fit into the character of the community. No one wants to waste time and money designing a building they won’t be allowed to put up. They want to know the rules up front.” She wants to see an end to the appearance of development projects being decided on a case-by-case basis, which is inconsistent and maddeningly slow. Sloane believes the discussions she’s heard around HRM by Design point the way forward. “If you look at places like Bermuda that have dealt with these issues, they have great architecture,” she says. “Lots of the buildings that have been proposed here are just plain boxes with no architectural quality.”

If the city creates an atmosphere that encourages beautiful buildings, the rest will follow, she believes. “We need to figure out, and figure out now, what we can all live with,” Sloane says. “What if we just say, from Duke Street to Spring Garden Road, buildings should be seven storeys and that’s it? That protects the view planes—from the heritage side, seven storeys isn’t a problem— and then the developers know the rules they have to work with.” That’s one of several compromises officials are discussing. But ultimately, it will take pressure on government, from people just like you, to keep advancing these issues. And as the research now attests, there isn’t such a broad gulf between development and heritage in the minds of Haligonians after all. “People get this,”Morley says. “For people to do well personally, they need to see economic growth in the city and they know that. The people most affected by it are the ones most supportive of it.”

Everyone can agree on one point: the city has to move beyond these issues. And what can you do? Sloane urges citizens to stay involved in the process—let officials know how you feel. Fight for the city you want. “It’s very important that we not analyze this to death,” Sloane says. “We have to start moving forward,” she says. “We have to get off the pot and do it now.”

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