Thursday, July 21, 2011
Bayers Road expansion plans target apartment buildings
Forty-nine units of needed affordable housing will be lost to turning lane.
Posted by Tim Bousquet on Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 7:56 AM
If built, the expanded roadway will be up to six lanes wide along parts of Bayers Road, and up to 10 lanes wide on parts of the Bicentennial Highway, with massive new bridges and intersections throughout.
The dollar price tag on the project are enormous: an “order of magnitude” study says the full project will cost $292 million in 2009 dollars, with $16 million devoted to just the Bayers Road part of it. By comparison, the entire Harbour Solutions project cost $330 million, and the Bridge Terminal rebuild is about $12 million. But there is an additional cost not examined in the Bayers/102 planning documents: the lost of a considerable stock of affordable housing.
The plan calls for the city to acquire three apartment buildings at the corner of Bayers Road and Connaught Avenue to make room for a turning lane. The buildings are in relatively good shape and are well maintained, with attractive landscaping. Collectively, they host 49 units, mostly two-bedroom apartments, but also a handful of one-bedroom apartments. They rent in the $700-800 range. In other words, they provide good housing for the working poor in a central peninsula location well accessible by transit.
If Bayers Road is expanded, those apartments will be torn down.
“It’s a marvelous example of what I’ve been talking about,” says Grant Wanzell, a planning professor at Dalhousie University who specializes in affordable housing. Wanzell has been working for years to create an affordable housing project on Gottingen Street with 48 units---one fewer than will be destroyed if Bayers Road is widened. Last week Wanzell took to CBC’s *Information Morning* to criticize the lack of comprehensive planning policies.
“All the government seems to be interested in is getting and spending the money for social and affordable housing, but the vast majority of affordable housing is actually out there in the private sector,” says Wanzell.
“We’re not looking at the private sector,” he continues, “and what municipalities are doing; the bigger issues about environment, about energy costs, about transportation costs, about planning---we’re just not connected to any of that stuff.” While city politicians and bureaucrats repeatedly talk of the need for affordable housing on the peninsula, the city has no affordable housing policies and efforts to get affordable housing requirements written into development law have been frustrated.
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Comments (35)
Showing 1-35 of 35
This idea is fucked, plain and simple. Bayers road isn't even that bad, really. As others have mentioned, 300mil is alot of money and I'm sure alternatives to paving more good land can be found. I was always a believer in light rail (since there was a whole lot of disused rail lines through the city, culminating downtown through a dedicated corridor) but nobody seems to want to take the (comparatively) small risk on people changing commuting habits and instead will spend 5 times more money on the status quo which has already been PROVEN to be unsustainable. We already have enough asphalt to upkeep, we don't need more.
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A couple or a couple with young kids, absolutely. Hawthorn school is right around the corner
dartmouthy you wrote : " Either way, condos started at $200K ..."
and I wrote : " King's Wharf where the units are priced at $300+ per sq ft, not including condo fees. If you know any families with that kind of money give them a call, I am sure you can find a dozen or so with $500,000 "
Did you see the word 'families' ? I used the word because they are the people buying homes in what you describe as 'sprawl'.
Is this your $200,000 unit : http://www.kingswharf.ca/index.php/floor-p… - which family will fit in that ?
Here is a 875 sq ft Studio for $285,000 :http://www.kingswharf.ca/index.php/floor-p…
or did you mean this 2 bedroom unit , 1000 sq ft for $325,000 : http://www.kingswharf.ca/index.php/floor-p…
Seriously, do you think a couple with young kids are in the market for this type of development ?
Compare the option of buying 1400 sq ft in King's Wharf and buying a 1400 sq ft home in Portland estates or elsewhere.
Perhaps you should change your name to Joe With a massive stick up his ass blow. Or blows big cocks for a living Joe. Either way, condos started at $200K at Kings Wharf. Feel free to exaggerate or whatever it is you are doing on here to make yourself feel better though, really. It's like free therapy. Culture of deaeat indeed.
dartmouthy - 'commuter buses' ??? You must have seen the Green Vans commuting into town and if there was a greater demand for such transit I am sure the market would respond.
Low vacancy rate does not translate into high rise office towers; it does translate into 5-7 storey projects where the developer is not at risk of blowing his brains out and can earn a return much quicker than a 20 storey building. I think you forgot about this part of your post " for those who have the deep pockets to afford a project." Not many of those type of developers around and bankers are a lot more careful than 3 years ago.
As for residential development I suggest take a look at King's Wharf where the units are priced at $300+ per sq ft, not including condo fees. If you know any families with that kind of money give them a call, I am sure you can find a dozen or so with $500,000 to spare.
We live in a couple of small towns cobbled together into a municipality in a small province with low population density. We ain't New York and environs andwill never be the Tokyo,Chiba, Yokohama conurbation; not even Boston bay area. Get used to it.
And as far as this report you posted is concerned:
http://www.cbre.ca/NR/rdonlyres/1926AF8A-C…
A 2.8% vacancy rate sounds pretty good for developers to me. Oh sorry, I should let you tell me what that means... right? lol
Hey joeblow,
For someone as pretentious about their "real estate and economical knowledge" as you are, you seem to have missed the boat that high rises can be residential in nature as well, thereby rendering your extremely lengthy and needlessly insulting verbal barrage completely useless.
As far as the "comparing this area with NYC is so silly" - wow I must be in dire straits here if I don't merit a response FROM YOU lol - isn't that more like a reward?
If you had the mental capacity to keep going about three words in that sentence you also would've seen the part about Commuter busses (have you ever been outside of this province?).
Sorry - I shouldn't use successful urban areas as examples of what Halifax could do right.
Feel free to recede back into your mental backwater from whence you came. It'll be easier on that pea sized unit of yours.
dartmouthy - you can read so go and read the Turner Drake report that HRM planning staff delayed releasing and then had it tabled as 'Draft' because it didn't conform to their, and your opinion as to the economic viability of new high rise office towers.
If you know any company willing to pay $35-40 per sq foot feel free to contact any commercial leasing broker.
HRM renewed its lease at Scotia Square last year for about $12 sq ft. after a tender call which limited proponents to a downtown Halifax location.
Take at look at rental rates in metro - http://www.cbre.ca/NR/rdonlyres/1926AF8A-C…
You write : " It is orders of magnitude more economical to build highrises, per unit, for those who have the deep pockets to afford a project. There is tons of private money invested in high rise development in this city. "
Name one that has come to market and been a financial success then I'll name one that bombed in the past few years.
Your comment re commuter rail and comparing this area with NYC is so silly as to not merit any response other than to say that brighter minds than yours have looked at the cost and the market and put it on the Santa Claus list. There are no rail lines to the S Shore.
I don't have a problem with tall buildings except those that require government tenants to pay high rents to make a project viable.
Your basic grasp of economics is staggering and you certainly don't have any knowledge of real estate
And if you don't want highrises, feel free to move to Lunenburg, Bridgewater, Enfield, Kentville or Truro
"Ditto large office towers... which just happen to be uneconomic."
"too expensive to build and no market for them"
What are you talking about?
It is orders of magnitude more economical to build highrises, per unit, for those who have the deep pockets to afford a project. There is tons of private money invested in high rise development in this city. Not to mention the benefits to the city strategically and economically.
What is "uneconomic" is sprawling suburbs with two acre lots, with the residents all yammering for the same city services as those who live in high rises downtown.
And as far as far flung rural communities and towns are concerned (Lunenburg, Bridgewater, Enfield, Kentville, Truro) that is nothing a commuter rail wouldn't solve eventually - or commuter busses that are cheaper to get going for now - like they have all over the NYC Area (I'm pretty sure you can take a bus anywhere in Conn or NJ to get to Penn Station)
porky - lots in Timberlea for $180,000 will result in homes starting at $550,000, perhaps your vast knowledge can explain why people buy a home there and not an expensive condo in downtown Halifax.
The townhouses start at $350,000 in Brunello and lots are available at less than $100,000. According to Brunello the commute is "...and only 15 minutes from downtown." Not much of a commute compared with other locations so I guess buyers will not be bitching about clogged roads. By the way, I do not believe you can drive from there to downtown Halifax in 15 minutes if you have to be at the office at 8 or 830 am.
People who work for the feds, the province, the big banks, the large legal and accounting firms, the universities and the hospitals all work on the peninsula; and will continue to do so for a long time.
If the market told developers that a lot of 20,30,40 storey residential buildings were needed downtown they would be built. Ditto large office towers... which just happen to be uneconomic.
Realist & Dartmouthy - don't forget all the commuters from Lunenburg, Bridgewater, Enfield, Kentville, Truro and the Eastern Shore. How do you propose to stop the sprawl beyond HRM boundaries ?
Obsessing about high rises is a waste of time, too expensive to build and no market for them.
Look, I don't care if it gets widened to support car lanes or to allow for a LRT right of way or something in between (other than useless bike lanes). Doesn't matter to me. The point is YOU HAVE TO WIDEN IT regardless. You can't do anything on this main corridor without it. Buy all the buses you want; they aren't going to go anywhere without the road capacity to support the growth of the city over the last couple of decades.
@Realist
Absolutely. Kings Wharf is a perfect example to me, you know? Like the tallest building in HRM will be in Dartmouth - at least until the 48 storey twisted sister two gets built (and are we taking bets the heritage trust.save the view fucktards must be having a fit over that).
A city of cities - is a city full of downtowns (Bedford, Dartmouth, Halifax, not to mention other hubs such as Westphal, Burnside, West End Halifax, etc.). All of those "nodes" can be densified, asnd as you said realist, it only improves the efficiency of city services and the tax dollars we already pay - not to mention the sizeable amounts of tax dollars the city receives from densification.
As far as I'm concerned anyone can be against development - as long as they are willing to absorb the resultant loss of tax dollars out of their own pocket. Otherwise they should STFU lol.
Sure, Calgary has oil money and they were able to build a great transit system FIRST and then plan densification around transit stops, killing two birds with one stone - growing the city in an orderly way - supporting mass transit ridership (now the highest in north america) and making their transit system PROFITABLE (also, the only one in North America)...
And BoGus you are right out to lunch if you think this project, and it's associated costs, and the resultant extra lanes which will be immediately filled with new cars, are helpful in any way.
Bo Gus, you're right, all of us HRM and NS taxpayers do contribute to every city and provincial project, and usually any given project serves a specific minority. That's fine, no reasonable person should have a problem with that basic concept. It's how we get things done.
However, the value of each project should be assessed based on the cost relative to the size of the group being served, as well as the real merits. In this case, there isn't even much of a problem being solved: we're proposing to fork out hundreds of millions to slightly ease commuting inconvenience that folks in dozens of other North American cities would laugh at. Because we are also not changing anything substantive about how traffic will percolate into the peninsula off that arterial, all we are doing is giving cars a somewhat different spot to idle for a few minutes.
What do bike lanes have to do with this particular proposal? Nothing. The scales of expenditure are enormously different. If this highway project received funds, based on the numbers that will petition that website, proportionate to how much money bike lane work gets relative to the number of cyclists in the area, you'd end up with enough money to widen maybe 50 yards of Bayers Road. We really do not have enough hard-earned taxpayer money to waste on shaving some minutes off commute times, and in fact this massive redistribution of private wealth is way more socialist than spending chump change on bike lanes.
Based on every project in the past few years it is pretty well guaranteed that city staff will estimate the cost at $292 million and it will come in at around $500 million. Although either this solution or commuter trains are required to get those that actually work in Halifax to their jobs. The minority here are those that commute to the peninsula to work and pay tax to support the vast amount of other government subsidized city and provincial government programs for retards like HalKell on this post, I say cut those too along with municipal tax dollars that go to "affordable" housing and maybe some companies will start to invest in our socialist province. Maybe families like HalKells will stop having babies they can not afford.
Come now - "all of us" are asked to contribute to support "a small minority" any time the city or province builds a road anywhere. For further explanation, see "bike lanes", the ultimate example of minority interest group spending. This project will serve far more travelers than all the bike lanes in the city.
Here's an online petition in support of the widening project:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/bayersr…
@dartmouthy: I agree with you, to an extent, but not (by extension) that much with PorkPie. Densification will help with service delivery (mass transit, water, sewer etc), but the centre of mass doesn't have to be all in one spot, and the biggest centre of mass doesn't have to be on Mini-Manhattan.
Increases in HRM population don't have to be squeezed into peninsular Halifax. Reducing urban sprawl can be accomplished by densifying a number of spots. And not more than a small percentage of those 700+ households in that new Timberlea estate, or in any other mainland subdivision, have people actually working in peninsular Halifax. Most of our "city" isn't on that peninsula, and doesn't even usually have much to do with that peninsula.
Seems to me that all of us are being asked to fork out for the convenience of a small minority of people who regularly commute onto or off the peninsula. All this while secondary roads across the province continue to crumble.
I'm confused... is gas going down?? $300M??? More pavement is just a band-aid solution. Maybe 30 lanes would work better until we can teleport into work?
@Pork Pie
I totally agree with you, and not in a passive agressive way lol. The only way out of this rut is smart development - which means densification and -ooooooh (in a ghostly voice) highrises. The sooner we do, the sooner the tax dollars will begin rolling in. And finally we will have the density for the city to _maybe_ begin (lol) considering planning for mass transit.
And to those who couldn't fathom a family living downtown - ever been to a real city like New York or Boston? Who do you think inhabits the high rises there?? lol. It isn't just the elderly and infirm.
joeblow - too bad you didn't do a little research before opening your yap - the new sub-division in Timberlea; some of the lots are starting at $180,000, not exactly chicken feed.
And I don't need to apply for a job anywhere as my home was paid for years ago, cash btw, and I'm living the good life retired early while other poor saps have to fight their way into town in gridlocked traffic.
Porkpie writes : "We need to get into the 21st century, fuck the view from the citadel and let the developers run amok with skyscrapers downtown! "
Sure, great idea.
I can just see all those families with kids and cars moving into $500,000 condos. Everyday I hear parents moaning about living in a home that cost less than $300,000 and how they are just crazy eager to move downtown.
You should apply for a job at Clayton Developments, they are desperate for a genius like you to guide their business into the brave new world of high rise living. They'll pay you a basic $25,000 plus another $1,000 for each family who buys a unit. Someday in about a thousand years you may be rich.
I live in the BLT area, before I retired the commute from here to my office down in the south end was a nightmare when the universities and schools were open. You have 2 choices the bi hi and then Bayers road or St. Margarets bay road, roundabout etc.
There is a new development in Timberlea, 700+ units with a golf course (Brunello Estates) and how do you think this additional traffic is going to get downtown?
I haven't heard anything further about a start date for the new roundabouts, Willow Tree etc - has anyone else?
Our cash hungry and idea starved city council and mayor will steal ideas from other cities and introduce punitive congestion charges, reduce free parking and generally fuck this city up even more than it already is.
We need to get into the 21st century, fuck the view from the citadel and let the developers run amok with skyscrapers downtown!
How is it that HRM Council failed to find a comparatively measly $25 M for the decades-promised and endlessly debated ferry service to/from Bedford (which would give options to those not wanting to drive downtown in cars and buses, stuck along the Bedford highway) but can even consider this nearly $300 M to pour into more roads? It makes ZERO sense in a time of fiscal restraint.
Peak oil is here or very near, depending on who you read. The prices of oil and gasoline for for cars has been trending up for the past decade and will skyrockets in prince in the coming decades. There are going to be far fewer cars, mainly because of the high cost of fuel, but HRM is not building alternatives such as mass transportation options.
HRM Council needs to realize it is foolishly pouring money into a slowly dying form of transportation that will very soon be unsustainable. Not to mention the incredible costs of fixing and maintaining this crazy infrastructure. This is NOT how I want my tax dollars spent nor is it the direction I want to see HRM go further towards. This is 1950s thinking.
I live in one of those buildings, it is a nice place for the money. I can not fathom what is going on in those fuckwads brains in city hall?? It is a waste of time and money. there are 40+ familys that are going to be be displaced for a little traffic congestion. Fuck you Kelly, I was a supporter until now, and fuck you to all the whiners who like burning 1.31$ a liter(at the time of this post).Get a bus pass.
That intersection doesn't even allow left turns on that side of Connaught. Turning lane doesn't even make sense. There are more points I could make, but others have beat me to it.
I honestly think that many of the folks who work as "planners" for this city have recently arrived via time capsule from the 1950s. They are apparently blissfully unaware of many of the basic lessons that urban planners have learned, painfully at times, in the last sixty years.
$290 million (probably much more when finally complete) would by a LOT of accessible and efficient mass transit, which is the direction they should be moving, not building bigger roads onto the peninsula.
Such a dumb plan, fucking waste of money that'll only move the bottleneck up the road.
How is it that HRM Council failed to find a comparatively measly $25 M for the decades-promised and endlessly debated ferry service to/from Bedford (which would give options to those not wanting to drive downtown in cars and buses, stuck along the Bedford highway) but can even consider this nearly $300 M to pour into more roads? It makes ZERO sense in a time of fiscal restraint.
Peak oil is here or very near, depending on who you read. The prices of oil and gasoline for for cars has been trending up for the past decade and will skyrockets in prince in the coming decades. There are going to be far fewer cars, mainly because of the high cost of fuel, but HRM is not building alternatives such as mass transportation options.
HRM Council needs to realize it is foolishly pouring money into a slowly dying form of transportation that will very soon be unsustainable. Not to mention the incredible costs of fixing and maintaining this crazy infrastructure. This is NOT how I want my tax dollars spent nor is it the direction I want to see HRM go further towards. This is 1950s thinking.
For under $50 Million we could have a dedicated transit route into the city in the South end rail cut; express buses using that transit route would take a lot of commuters off of Bayers Road and the Bedford Highway.
This needs to be done. To have that cartpath as the major entryway into our city is ridiculous.
Most days I'm lucky enough to work from home but about once a week I have to make the trek from Dartmouth to Bayers Road in the middle of "rush hour". The "traffic" on Bayers Road is laughable. It's the quickest part of my commute.
$292 million - enough to build 50km of light rail tracks - NEW TRACKS, 50 trains and 20 LRT stations. Keep going backwards you fuck wads at city hall! Your idiocy is showing - again.
300 Million dollars-> WTF for?? To ease the HOUR or two of congested traffic we have twice /day??? This ain't Toronto, it's Halifax. Traffic moves fine (light timing could be better) for 20-21 hours/day. This expansion will only move the bottle neck up the road and do nothing but waste our money on something foolish.
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