I remember a large advertising campaign by the local lottery poking fun at the quality of life between Ontario and Nova Scotia. Mostly jokes about traffic, urban sprawl and high cost of living...
Unfortunately, Halifax has become an urban sprawl, where the peripheries are under-serviced by the municipality and the city center has a dramatically steep cost of living.
Outside of the city center, the communities are becoming incredibly homogenized. Identical looking housing developments with a poor mixture of single and multifamily dwellings, in communities that have little access to public transit. Every few kilometres their interspersed with a shopping center clusters of the same sorts of businesses that provide basic services and goods. A McDonalds and a Tim Horton's and a few other fast food restaurants, a Sobey's or Superstore, an NSLC and maybe a few clusters of private offices, the occasional shopping mall. Hardware stores and specialized retailers clustered mostly in the business parks.
I grew up in the suburbs of Dartmouth, it's a homogeneous place, both culturally and aesthetically. You could be in the middle of Dartmouth and mistake it for a suburb of Moncton, Fredericton or any other town in the Maritimes.
Our larger communities in the Maritimes are losing their independent businesses and cultural fixtures, the things that make them unique. The only exceptions to this seem to be small towns that aren't along the main trunk highways (Think of the towns around the southern tip of Nova Scotia, Lunenbourg County and the Northumberland Shore) or the city center of Halifax.
When you drive through Truro, it's eerily similar to when you drive past Dartmouth Crossing and Moncton. Our communities are becoming so alike and losing their personal touches...
And all that said, I love the place. I can't put my finger on what it is about it. Maybe it's because it's the few cities I've been in where you feel like you're really in touch with nature, be it the harbour and the ocean and the pockets of woods dotted throughout the city and how little distance you have to go to be out in the middle of the country. And the peninsula is a wild and eclectic place with all sorts of interesting business and characters, if the rest of the city could develop itself in a way that's purposefully focused on creating, unique, livable communities the outer areas of Halifax could become really great places to be.
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Unfortunately, Halifax has become an urban sprawl, where the peripheries are under-serviced by the municipality and the city center has a dramatically steep cost of living.
Outside of the city center, the communities are becoming incredibly homogenized. Identical looking housing developments with a poor mixture of single and multifamily dwellings, in communities that have little access to public transit. Every few kilometres their interspersed with a shopping center clusters of the same sorts of businesses that provide basic services and goods. A McDonalds and a Tim Horton's and a few other fast food restaurants, a Sobey's or Superstore, an NSLC and maybe a few clusters of private offices, the occasional shopping mall. Hardware stores and specialized retailers clustered mostly in the business parks.
I grew up in the suburbs of Dartmouth, it's a homogeneous place, both culturally and aesthetically. You could be in the middle of Dartmouth and mistake it for a suburb of Moncton, Fredericton or any other town in the Maritimes.
Our larger communities in the Maritimes are losing their independent businesses and cultural fixtures, the things that make them unique. The only exceptions to this seem to be small towns that aren't along the main trunk highways (Think of the towns around the southern tip of Nova Scotia, Lunenbourg County and the Northumberland Shore) or the city center of Halifax.
When you drive through Truro, it's eerily similar to when you drive past Dartmouth Crossing and Moncton. Our communities are becoming so alike and losing their personal touches...
And all that said, I love the place. I can't put my finger on what it is about it. Maybe it's because it's the few cities I've been in where you feel like you're really in touch with nature, be it the harbour and the ocean and the pockets of woods dotted throughout the city and how little distance you have to go to be out in the middle of the country. And the peninsula is a wild and eclectic place with all sorts of interesting business and characters, if the rest of the city could develop itself in a way that's purposefully focused on creating, unique, livable communities the outer areas of Halifax could become really great places to be.