Ask the right people, and you’ll discover Halifax is about to get a lot bigger. Looking at recent statistics, the population of HRM rose from 359,111 in 2001 to 390,096 in 2011. That’s an average growth rate of nearly 1% every year. While past performance is no guarantee of future results, at that rate we’re looking at around 407,000 people by 2020 and 453,000 by 2031. But according to the Halifax Partnership, those numbers are low.
The “economic development organization” is targeting a population of 550,000 by 2031, up from today’s 390,000. However that’s 15 years out, the “anything is possible” realm. In the short term, three-and-a-bit years from now, the Partnership—with support from mayor Mike Savage—wants to grow the city to 470,000 people by 2020. That’s a growth rate of 1.7% every year. Getting ready for that kind of growth is the subject of the Centre Plan, which is the subject of our latest video explainer: You can watch it here before reading the rest of the story.
So far we’ve been talking about serious growth. But just two years ago, the Halifax Indexreported a yearly growth rate of just .4%, with a population decreaseof about 850 younger people between 2012 and 2013.
Like we said, it depends on who you ask.
But without a doubt, what’s really changed recently is where, and how, growth is happening. If you look at the number of new units added to HRM every year between 2001 and 2015, there hasn’t been much change: It’s basically between 2,000 and 3.000.
Look into the details, though, and there are clear trends. We’re building a lot more apartment units now, and a lot fewer single-detached, semi-detached and row houses
Besides building bigger buildings, the other trend is we’re building more in the city centre. That reflects a lot of the changes we’ve been noticing on the peninsula and downtown Dartmouth. More people are wanting to live in the city centre, and development has been shifting to meet that change in demand. A large task of the municipality’s Centre Plan is to figure out how to accommodate that growth while balancing a variety of concerns and issues from the community and property developers.
In writing the plan, the city’s taken a cue from the research—Halifax needs to meet the rising demand for housing in the city centre. The question isn’t how much we grow but how we grow. The Centre Planners put out a survey asking the public to pick between three future growth scenarios for areas like Spring Garden Road, Wyse Road, Young Avenue, Quinpool Road and Agricola Street. Those three growth scenarios offer different options for the proportion of high-rises to mid-rises in an area. They all maintain the same amount of growth.
Although the survey is closed now, over coming months there will be other chances for you to get involved and have your say about the Centre Plan. One way to find out more is to check the plan’s website, but your easiest first step for more information is to watch the first video in our Centre Plan series:
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This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2016.
The survey isn’t working.
Hey, I’m doing my part to keep the population down…
The FIRST thing to do before online planning is to make the population growth estimates are the BEST.
They are not and there is no real justification for the inflated numbers being used by HRM.
160k pop. growth give us a break! Get real.
Iain T.
I agree with Iain. The population increase in recent years has been about 4,000. The Centre Plan projections are simply way out of line. Where does the planning department figure these masses of people are coming from? You will note that they haven’t dealt with it.
The distribution of these units as projected by the planners have been calculated to try and get 25% of new housing units in the ‘centre’ (the Peninsula and central Dartmouth) so maybe 1,000 for the ‘centre’. However, in spite of the fact that the Peninsula (not the Centre) has, in the last two years, approved, have under construction or recently completed over 3,400 units…great, all the newcomers can just move right in. But wait a minute…all these units are small with one bedroom units dominating. Families cannot live in these very small apartments.
Between the 2012 and 2016 elections, the number of Eligible Voters in HRM dropped from 298,209 to 291,427 for a loss of 6782 or about 2.3% if my math is right (still using “Old Math”).
Those numbers suggest a probable drop in the number of households, so who is going to occupy all those new units?
I await with bated breath the release of the 2016 census results, to see how they compare with Halifax Partnership’s figures.