Three years after HRM By Design was adopted to standardize development in the downtown, the war over building height rages on. Fronts are forming around the Roy and Discovery Centre buildings on Barrington, and CBC and YMCA buildings at Sackville and South Park. Proposals for the Roy and Discovery Centre will undergo public hearings May 10.
Both buildings are in what By Design calls Barrington Heritage District, which is designed to keep the look, feel and height of traditional old buildings. But because the applications were filed before the district was approved, the old rules will apply.
Starfish Properties, owned by Louis Reznick, applied to replace the Roy Building with a 16-storey office and residential building. “We bought it with the full intention to renovate and restore it,” Reznick says. “We consulted six architects on schemes and dreams and ways to work with building facades. There’s no saving it.”
He adds that his company has a good environmental track record—having implemented a recycling program for Roy tenants, installed new boilers, recycled wood from the Roy and recycled steel and crushed concrete at previous demo sites—and will consider sustainable features like a green roof, greywater system and insulation. “We all know nothing would be greener than to save an old building, but there’s no insulation. It’s leaking everywhere.”
Reznick promises a high-quality building and says green features attract tenants in today’s market. “We need density in the downtown,” he adds. “We need a tax base. Economic benefits translate into environmental benefits.” He is driven not just by profit but also a desire to grow and beautify Halifax, architecturally. He promises a beautiful building.
But the body of evidence suggests that high-rise buildings don’t build community; they kill it, while hurting the environment. Edmund P. Fowler, author of Building Cities That Work, writes that multi-family houses (such as duplexes and three-storey flats) can hold the same number of people per hectare as do high-rises. But the latter are built of steel and concrete, two of the planet’s most energy-intensive materials.
Their construction also uses more materials per square metre of usable space, and they go on using more energy per square metre to maintain complex systems and features. They are the biggest energy user and producer of greenhouse gas emissions of any building type. Luckily, they don’t last more than a few decades.
High-rises are just as disastrous socially. Despite often being located downtown, their residents drive more. They talk to their neighbours less. That may be because they fear them—crime rates are greater in high- rises, regardless of income.
Phil Pacey, president of Heritage Trust, doesn’t disagree with the need for density. But he says there are ample opportunities for development without demolition or high-rise construction.
According to Pacey’s written assessment, “The proposed [Roy] tower would be four-and-a-half times as high as the average height of the adjacent heritage properties, and five-and-a-half times as high as the white Colwell Brothers Building, three doors to the north.” He also writes that the Discovery Centre proposal would be four times the average height of surrounding buildings.
While adamant that new heritage rules don’t apply to this case, Reznick has made heritage concessions, most notably reducing the base of the new building and copying the present facade. Pacey says that regardless of facade, the size is way out of proportion with the rest of the streetscape.
It’s the eternal density verses heritage debate, but the heritage advocates rightly point out that with 500,000 square feet of vacant downtown office space, and another million square feet of vacant lots, densification doesn’t require demolition—the two really aren’t related.
“The real estate firm Turner Drake identified 40 to 50 downtown sites that are appropriate for development,” Pacey says, “providing 10 to 13 million square feet of additional floorspace, double what we have. It would take 50 to 70 years to fill that and HRM By Design only lasts 23 more years.”
Save the View’s Peggy Cameron adds that, despite the abundance of vacant downtown land, the city continues approving projects “somewhere beyond belief of size beyond comprehension,” effectively encouraging sprawl over density. “Paris is one of the most densely populated cities in the world—there, the urban centre has buildings of four to six storeys.”
This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2011.
I am unsure how I feel about these proposed buildings right now, and I certainly don’t want to see Halifax turned into downtown Toronto. However, I need to point out that this article is so biased as to undercut any credible argument made. Don’t get me wrong, I recognize that bias exists in all media, and I even prefer a little liberal bias myself. But this article is bordering on Fox News-esque misinformation, half truths, and abuse of facts to support a particular viewpoint. I certainly don’t want to see the Coast become that.
For example, the suggestion that duplexes and triplexes can hold a similar number of people per hectare as highrises is probably true when you’re comparing to the tower-in-the-park style highrises that are surrounded by useless green space. But downtown Halifax doesn’t have tons of wasted green space and the tall buildings are right next to each other. To suggest that you could somehow achieve the same density in downtown Halifax with duplexes and triplexes (as this article implies) says to me that either you lack a shred of spatial reasoning, or you’re deliberately using sources out of context to support your poor argument.
As for Paris, yes it has an average density that is very high. But we have to remember that this was achieved by Haussmann basically razing the existing city and building it to that density. So sure, let’s buck the North American trend of uber-dense core and low density other areas and build Halifax to a constant four to six storeys. Where shall we start the bulldozing? Hmmm let’s go with Schmidtville first. Or perhaps some of the South End’s beautiful homes? Oh? We care about those places too? Then we should probably stop comparing the situation here to a city that exists in a completely different context.
This article is an uniformed disgrace. High rises are one of the most common built forms in cities all over the world, and when done well they are perfectly livable. In Toronto, New York, Chicago, and in cities all over Asia and Latin America, it’s quite common for even affluent people to live in high rises. I suppose Chris Benjamin believes all of these millions and millions of successful people are enduring misery and squalor and dreaming about one day escaping to Halifax.
“hipp5” has already debunked the article’s mendacious claims about comparative population densities, but I’d just like to add one more point. Paris has a remarkably high population density because most people live in tiny apartments (to this day there are many Paris apartments with shared bathrooms down the hall) and because most neighbourhoods have almost no green space. Paris certainly has its charms, but the reality is that most North Americans expect a different standard of living. Halifax is never, ever going to be remade in the image of Paris.
The environmental arguments in this article are equally problematic. It’s true that many high rises are energy wasters, because they were built at a time when no one cared about energy efficiency. But many newer high rises are highly efficient, and it’s also possible to retrofit older ones. Toronto has an exciting project to do just that (though its future is in jeopardy because of the new bonehead mayor): http://www.towerrenewal.ca/
If anyone wants a more nuanced and intelligent take on life in towers, I highly recommend the NFB’s award-winning online documentary on the subject: http://highrise.nfb.ca/
Sorry, in my previous comment “uniformed disgraced” should be “uninformed disgrace.” A Freudian slip, perhaps.
This article is stretching. I’d like to see a comparison of the environmental effects of urban sprawl vs highrises. Compare the size of areas like Tantallon and Clayton Park ten years ago to their sizes today. Development is happening all over the place – just not downtown.
Deceitful, lazy, and HARMFUL journalism. Stifle development downtown and developers will continue to replace thousands of acres of forest outside the city with low-density urban sprawl…where EVERYONE drives. Real sustainable!
Where do claims like “despite often being located downtown, [highrise] residents drive more” come from? 41% of core (defined as peninsula/Dartmouth within the Circ) residents walk to work, a figure consistantly less than 5% in new suburbs. The new owner of Fenwick wants an exemption from minimum parking requirements for his redevelopment because car ownership among current residents is really, really low, and he’s got a major glut of parking.
You’re relying on tired anti-urban cliches (“high-rise buildings don’t build community; they kill it, while hurting the environment”) that go against decades of established development proving otherwise. Vancouver has been doing dense transit-oriented development since the 1970s and for that they have a public transit system with phenomenal ridership and coverage for a city of that population. Since the opening of the new Canada Line, revenues of the municipal parking authority have dropped 20%. Higher-order transit options like BRT, trams, or light rail aren’t viable unless you have a solid, dense population base along the route.
The reason so much office space is free downtown is all the cheap stuff we allow developers to throw up in places like Dartmouth Crossing, Burnside, and Bayers Lake — where almost EVERYONE drives. Where high quality public transit will NEVER be viable. And where a ridiculous acreage of trees had to be clearcut, the land blasted to smithereens and reformed. Google Earth has a neat feature that allows you to view aerial imagery between today and 2003. Check it out. Is that sustainable environmentally? Financially, when the city has to put down new infrastructure instead of making use of what exists downtown already?
Scaremongering like this will only serve to propagate urban sprawl — killing local business, worsening traffic congestion, and creating soul-crushing streetscapes characterized by huge parking lots and drive-thrus. James Howard Kunsler put it nicely: ‘Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading: the jive plastic commuter tract wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the gourmet mansardic junk food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain gang guards, the particle board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth”.’
I used to live in a very dense neighbourhood in Toronto (Davisville). The was less traffic than my current neighbourhood in Halifax, however, because basically everyone took the subway. And yes, I knew my neighbours. Now I live on the peninsula and never drive. Meanwhile, my family in Cole Harbour owns two cars and can’t even walk to the shops. “Densification” doesn’t mean Halifax is magically going to look like New York. But a few apartment buildings in faltering areas like Barrington and Gottingen could do wonders to put more feet on the street — and reduce suburban sprawl to boot!
Yikes! This article is full of misleading half-truths. Some duplexes can hold more people than some highrises, like say suburban highrises set in large parking lots, but they cannot hold more people than a tall building built to the lot line without overcrowding.
As for lasting a few decades, why is it that cities like New York are filled old highrise buildings, some over 100 years old?
Lately it seems like some authors at The Coast are more interested in promoting their own personal agendas than they are in writing informative articles.
You shit-disturber you! Way to go , Chris, that’s exactly what a good columnist is supposed to do Although I don’t know enough about the subject to form my own opinion, I applaud your article and say ,”Keep up the disturbing work.” Great job!
By the way, Chris, people love your book, Drive-by Saviours.
What backwards thinking school did you attend to formulate this sort of ridiculous opinion?
Congratulations on getting this exceedingly one sided opinion piece published!
Perhaps you should be working for a PR Firm hired by the aforementioned retards: Phil Pacey and Peggy Cameron.
been to paris,they have high rise buildings in a dense cluster in their industrial centre,only miles from the heart of old paris..peggy cameron should have researched more…
Savvy big-time developer buys a building and then claims SURPRISE!!! the roof leaks and it has no insulation? Give me a break. If I buy a house and don’t do due diligence before I buy it…well, tough for me. As far as I know, when you buy a property you are responsible for it. If I need a new roof I don’t go to the city to ask for a development agreement to allow me to triple the allowable size of my house so I can rent out rooms to pay for it.
As for the posting by halifaxmentor…you missed the point. We are tolking about city centres here…not industrial parks/areas a ‘few miles from downtown.” As for the criticisms of Chris’s research I am sure that in the interest of fairness the Coast will give you space in the letters section to present well-researched evidence of the opposing points of view.
Anther good article on the subject: “Cracks in the City Of Glass” April 19, 2011 in the Globe and Mail. It’s online.
A few more remarks. Calvin makes some excellent points about the lack of controls on suburban development and the lack of investment in downtown. If you are looking for a reason for stagnation of downtown look no further, for example, than HRM tax policies which assess the square footage of business properties on the Peninsula at many times those in suburban areas. However, the question of what is good for a few blocks of Barrington St. is an entirely different matter. Starfish Properties has had a chunk of a whole block of Barrington St. under brown paper for years. The proposed development agreement would give them another six years to get a new building completed; six years of more street level vacancies, demolition. construction, noise, garbage, hoardings, etc. Not to mention the loss of the present tenants in the building who presently add to the life to Barrington. Add to this the proposed construction atop the Discovery Centre building taking place at the same time. How will this affect the other businesses on that section of the street? Will they/can they still be there in six years? What will all that mass and height do to the life on the street? The wind study for the Roy buiding development, for example, admits the new building will often make standing on BarringtonSt. uncomfortable in the winter months. What about all of us who wait for buses there? The way I understand it, most of the businesses on Barrington St. were in favour of the new Barrington St. heritage area because of the economic development associated with conservation areas. (If you doubt this Google Heritage Conservation areas — Economic Benefits and read the first 100 or so; there are tens of thousands of entries). Heritage Conservation areas are an alternate form of development. As all of the negative comments re: Chris’s article really acknowledge, the sixties-type high rise, glass tower type of development that we have been fostering downtown in the last few decades isn’t working. Downtown has a problem. So what’s the point of more of the same? Let’s give something else a chance.
Super job Chris Benjamin on your parody of theonion.com , one of my favourite internet sites. I love how they pretend to write real news, throwing in the most outlandish statements at the same time keeping a straight face. Great fun. You get high marks for saying downtown residents drive more and that high rises last little more than 20 years. Travel to San Gimignano Italy where their towers are still standing after 700 years. My favourite was that you go to Paris to see buildings of 4 to 6 stories when in fact the Paris urban area contains the most skyscrapers of any metropolitan area in the European Union. Keep up the good work.
Paris also is a huge sprawling city (has she been to Paris?), with its own problems in the suburbs (banlieues) that support such a large population. Is Peggy advocating more urban sprawl? That just ain’t coool.
Ok, I just want to make sure I have this right before I go any further: the Urban Sprawl of Halifax over the past 10-15 years (I remember mountain biking on trails where Lacewood is now) is BAD and developers who want to create high density towers in downtown Halifax are also BAD. Do I have this right?
Many of those posting comments, it seems, have read this article as an either/or argument; either highrises or urban sprawl. One commenter even puts it as “urban sprawl vs highrises.” I don’t think that’s the point at all. Here’s my Coles notes version:
1. High rises, as rightly pointed out by many in these comments (“the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain gang guards”) have historically been inefficient and out of place.
2. There’s lots of space, on peninsular Halifax, to densify with buildings that fit with those in their surroundings. No need for sprawl or for buildings four times the size of their neighbours.
3. Heritage preservation is good for business and good for the soul.
4. And lastly, smaller buildings have greater potential for environmental efficiency and human scale interaction.
Much is made in the comments of the comparison to Paris. Obviously Halifax is not analogous to Paris but one of the lessons to be learned is that building height in the majority of the city is kept quite reasonably low. Certain areas, particularly at La Defense, are a collection of high rises but that’s an area where high rises are not out of context. Montparnasse tower is really a bit of an anomaly in an otherwise consistent, beautiful, much visited and adored area/city.
What I do find interesting is taking the comment of someone being interviewed to generalize to the article overall or to its integrity. Sloppy reading seems more like it.
I’d like it if people would stop referring to these proposals(or any other in Halifax) as high-rises!!! Sheesh…..
Exactly Hoser111, lol – the only building being built or proposed to be built in this city that even begins to reach high rise status (Kings Wharf, at 33 stories) is in Dartmouth! So all you heritage loving Haligonians can rest easy.
In conclusion I remain confused as to the purpose of the article. Is this an argument about the “greeness” or social implications of high rises? Or, perhaps, is this an argument about the effects of proposed high rises on HRM By Design? The again, is this article about a recent event in which these proposed high rises were involved? I, unfortunately, found myself lost in moralistic hyperbole and am rendered incapable of deciding which question best suits the article. Therefore I shall comment no further.
Exactly.
I object to the artwork accompanying the article. It is an over-exaggerated out of scale cartoon chosen to support an ill informed opinion piece. (if you count stories in the short buildings as the floor to floor height, the high rise is about 50 stories, all alone with no other buildings around it).
Also, repeated reference is made to HRM By Design, a new standard that I don’t think these projects are not subject to.