HRM By Design goes to Halifax council for approval

“Halifax was unique, before we got into this, in not having an urban design plan—urban design has been emerging as a
serious discipline in the last 20 or so years,” says Andy Filmore,
manager of the $405,000 HRM By Design planning initiative.

This Tuesday, June 2, culminating three years of highly charged
debate, dozens of meetings and a three-day long public hearing,
regional council will vote on the bylaws and regulatory changes that
make up the downtown portion of HRM By Design.

“I should actually say re-emerging,” Fil-more continues. “Back in
the grand era of public works, what people called this was civic
design. We built beautiful roads and bridges and infrastructure that we
admire today as great works of our culture. And we’ve lost all
that—we started building highly engineered structures and so
forth.”

Such opinions were at one time the purview of the radical
fringe—perhaps first given coherent form in 1993 with James
Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere—but are now solidly in the
mainstream. I can find nobody locally who disagrees with the general
premise: We used to build things right. Cities were densely populated,
their streets and sidewalks focusing on people walking and shopping,
the buildings themselves attractive, the parks delightful and all of it
brought together in a coherent, defining whole.

For a number of reasons—the arrival of the automobile and
suburbanization, and what Kunstler calls “cartoon architecture” that
mocks the idea of beauty, among others—the way we used to build
cities fell out of fashion sometime between the 1940s and ’60s. With
very few exceptions, nobody much likes anything that was built from the
’70s through the ’90s.

In the most recent decade or two, however, cities have come to face
the real costs of extending services to suburbs, and we’ve come to
understand the environmental costs of sprawl. There’s been a renewed
focus on city centres, and people have adopted a new social ethic;
suburbs are out, replaced by the idea of what urban theorist Richard
Florida calls “the creative class”—a roving band of artists and tech
workers who, because their employment is not tied to the geography of
traditional manufacturing, can live anywhere they choose. The creative
class, says Florida, wants dynamic urban living, with lots of cultural
institutions and a distinctive sense of place.

Across North America, cities are attempting to turn themselves into
those desired urban centres by focusing on design and architecture, and
on support for cultural institutions, the idea being that cities that
match the new urban ethic will in turn attract more of the creative
class, becoming still more desirable.

Downtown Halifax saw some horrific building in the 1960s and ’70s,
including the Maritime Centre, Scotia Square and Cogswell Interchange,
and culminating in the now-universally condemned plan for a waterfront
expressway called Harbour Drive.

Heritage groups ultimately prevailed in stopping Harbour Drive from
being built, and the city began to promote its unique historic
identity, which in turn became the engine of one of our main
industries, tourism.

Since then, the battle between heritage and new construction has
taken on a public identity much larger than its reality.

To be sure, heritage groups have in fact opposed many downtown
developments—most notably the Twisted Sisters, Midtown Tavern and
Waterside Centre proposals—but with mixed results.

In part to address the public perception of heritage preservation
impending growth, many of the details of HRM By Design, and a great
deal of the public debate around it, are focused on the one hand on
heritage conservation districts and incentives for preservation and, on
the other hand, on streamlining the development approval process and
taking away rights of appeal by citizen groups.

These debates are interesting but irresolvable—both sides are
right. Differing opinions, for example, on what new building heights
are allowed presently and what HRM By Design allows depend on which set
of bureaucratic assumptions you work with; does “allowed presently”
mean “as a right,” or “by development agreement”? Each answer results
in a different set of conclusions.

But those who have looked at the underlying economics of downtown
development say debates over heritage are beside the point.

“It is a red herring to suggest that the lack of downtown office
development since the 1980s is the result of opposition from heritage
groups,” writes Mike Turner, a real estate consultant hired by the city
to predict the future growth potential of downtown, in his quarterly
newsletter. “Admittedly anything that increases cost retards
development, but their [heritage groups’] efforts have not constrained
office growth to any measurable degree.”

Rather, says Turner, the stagnation in downtown Halifax is explained
entirely by the economic reality of development.

“The harsh reality is that demand no longer exists to warrant
development, and, as a result, tenants are unwilling to pay the rents
necessary to spur new projects at prices which reflect the developer’s
current opportunity cost,” he explains.

In dollar terms, office rents would have to increase about half
again above present rates before they inspire much in the way of new
development. It’s true, says Turner, that vacancy rates are at historic
lows downtown, but that’s only because, adjusted for inflation, rents
are at record lows, presenting a bargain for leaseholders. The low
vacancy rate is not pushing rents up, indicating that firms aren’t much
interested in locating downtown.

Turner blasts the provincial economic development agency, Nova
Scotia Business Inc., for declaring that there is demand for two
million square feet of new office space downtown. “Based on our
conversations with property owners, developers and brokers active in
Downtown Halifax, and information provided by NSBI, we calculate that
such demand is probably in the region of 50,000 square feet,” says
Turner—just 2.5 percent of NSBI’s claims, and considerably less than
the 80,000 square feet that will become available in the relatively
small Waterside Centre development.

In a previous era, professional offices congregated in downtown
districts in order to avail themselves of each other’s services, but
nowadays, most businesses can put their back offices out in suburban
business parks, where rents are cheaper, and connect with all the
associated businesses via the internet.

Turner says such economies make it unlikely much new office space
will be constructed downtown. Instead, look for hotel and residential
development, both of which are dependent on that “creative class”
looking for a city with a distinctive identity.

“Therefore,” he concludes, “it is in the community’s best interests,
economic as well as social, that they protect and nurture the
downtown’s built heritage. The current divisive debate over what shall
prevail, heritage or high rise, completely misses the point. Without
the former, the creative class would be lacking to support the latter.
In our view, HRM By Design is worthless unless city council exhibits
leadership and enacts a strategy to promote heritage restoration and
conservation.”

With that, Turner is laying out an argument roughly parallel to that
of offered by the Ecology Action Centre and GPI Atlantic, both of which
argue that HRM By Design is generally a step in the right direction
in concept, but may not achieve its stated goals unless council
adopts concrete policies to address the broader concerns of energy
efficiency and sustainability. The groups differ in that while Turner
supports passage of HRM By Design followed by meaningful protection for
heritage conservation, EAC and GPI oppose passage of the plan until
meaningful energy efficiency and transportation strategies are in
place.

Either way, the rush to implement HRM By Design appears to be rooted
in the hope that it will usher in new office development downtown. But
Turner, the man charged with seeing whether there’s any realistic
expectation that that hope will be realized, says it won’t.

This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2009.