“Businesses aren’t going to locate downtown until their employees can afford to live on the peninsula,” Ross Cantwell tells me.
Cantwell is a real estate consultant who works for some of the biggest property owners in Halifax, and specializes in the economics of development. He knows the local market as well as anyone, and matches that knowledge with a genuine concern for the working poor.
The people at the bottom of the wage scale—those working in Timmy’s and restaurants, as secretaries and warehouse workers, as the entry-level clerks and so forth—are nearly priced out of living on the peninsula, explains Cantwell, because rent is just too high unless they’re willing to live eight to an apartment or in very substandard housing. Therefore many move out to Clayton Park or Dartmouth, where there’s better housing at less cost.
The result is that businesses wanting to locate downtown are finding that in addition to their other costs, they have to pay a wage premium, to make up for the lost time and costs of commuting. Employees, for their part, want to work close to their homes, which increasingly means in the business parks of Burnside and Bayers Lake. All of this works to slow the development potential of downtown, and impacts the taxpayer considerably, as the city has to subsidize transit, build and maintain wider roads and extend services to the suburbs.
In 2004, Cantwell and Ray Tomalty, a consultant and academic working in Montreal, were hired by the city to produce a housing affordability study, which made a series of detailed proposals for how to address the high cost of housing. Those measures included giving density bonuses to developers who include affordable housing in their projects, giving financial help to groups providing affordable housing, mandating that a portion of all new development be affordable, among others.
None of those affordable housing recommendations, however, were included in the city’s 2006 regional plan, an issue that miffs Cantwell. City officials think that affordable housing is a provincial concern, and want nothing to do with it, says Cantwell, even though housing affordability is directly tied into development patterns.
To Cantwell’s great credit, earlier this year he convinced the heavy hitters in Halifax’s development industry—financiers, builders, architects and engineers—to form the Nova Scotia Housing Trust, which promptly used their abilities to first leverage federal and provincial housing funds, then buy two properties on Gottingen Street—the former Derby and MET buildings.
The Housing Trust has designed a mixed apartment complex for the Derby site—60 affordable units together with 60 market-priced units in a building stretching from Gottingen to Maitland streets. The plan is to get that built and running, then move to the MET site. With those projects under its belt, Cantwell says the organization can hire full-time staff to get still more housing into the future.
Problem is, Cantwell is facing an uphill battle with an indifferent city bureaucracy, partly related to the proposed height of the Derby project—10 storeys in a zone that’s limited to five storeys on Gottingen and four on Maitland.
I’m sensitive to height issues—they are a valid neighbourhood concern for a lot of places—but for this site, sticking to inflexible height limits is ridiculous. No one lives near the site, and all the businesses in the area very much want the project, as it’ll bring them new customers. Moreover, the additional height brings an identifiable, needed public good, and isn’t overwhelming in any event.
Then there’s a problem with building permits—because it’s a not-for-profit, Housing Trust wants some assistance with the half-million dollars in building permit fees— after being rejected for a break on the fees, the Trust asked if, instead of paying the fees upfront, it could pay at final inspection, right before the occupancy permit is granted. Staff rejected that proposal as well.
In the end, fewer than 50 affordable housing units have been built in Halifax over the past decade. And here’s an organization that is energized and has the expertise to start down the path of providing us more, but due to bureaucratic indifference and, really, hostility, it is being frustrated.
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This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2010.
How really sad this is ..Good luck and thanks for looking out for the little guy.
Disgusting.
Mayor Kelly says housing is not a municipal responsibility, he was quoted in the Hreald last week.
Why is a convention centre a municipal responsibility ?
Why are rock concerts a municipal responsibility ?
Ask him, ask the councillors.
Great article… Halifax city, and their staff, seem to have a problem with indifference only when it comes to something that really makes a positive difference, such as the affordable housing issue – instead the city would rather spend their time obstructing and fighting businesses over the kind of signs they use to advertise their businesses.
Is it really that important to have a “Made in Halifax” solution to everything, when City Hall and staff are too inept to see the forest for the trees?
What power do we as citizens have to get this issue on the radar of city hall?
A 10 story building, in the “inner city” – within view of hulking monoliths like the Ocean Towers and Ahern Manor, should be a no-brainer.
Speaking of no-brainers – density bonuses to developers who include affordable housing in their projects, giving financial help to groups providing affordable housing and mandating that a portion of all new development be affordable are all achievable goals, and if City Hall really cared about the city and its citizens it would be doing anything it could to enable them to their fullest extent.
Why don’t we just recognize the reality, that there is no one single downtown? And never has been. If you want to talk about re-vitalizing the former downtown of peninsular Halifax, feel free, but please be that specific. Your downtown isn’t mine – I am from Dartmouth and always have been. Longtime residents of Bedford or Sackville or mainland Halifax probably don’t think of downtown Halifax as being particularly meaningful to them either. I’m not convinced that downtown Halifax has even been that important for most of peninsular Halifax for a long time.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for maintaining the vitality of neighbourhoods, on a neighbourhood by neighbourhood basis. And there are quite a few neighbourhoods in peninsular Halifax that can use the kind of help being talked about in this editorial. But tying all this affordable housing talk to a notion of a downtown Halifax that needs to be rebuilt is a losing cause. *That* downtown was toast over a quarter of a century ago. The best way to get it back is to relocate all the bank buildings, the government office towers, parkades and parking lots, Maritime Centre, Scotia Square, the Metro Centre, and current and future convention centres; it’s these structures that stamped out the life in that particular neighbourhood.
On the subject of subsidies of some parts of HRM by others, common sense tells us that this must be the case in general, and intuitively we can even identify some outlying suburbs that must be beneficiaries in this juggling act. However, I’d be leery of drawing any major conclusions until much better statistics are available for who is driving from where to where, and when. Despite being able to put pretty good numbers to the traffic flow on the bridges, and various streets when they happen to be instrumented, I guarantee that city and provincial transportation planning agencies can barely answer questions of this nature…and without that data it’s hard to quantitatively assess the true impact of sprawl.
It’s a shame we have to worry about height and funding issues for this project. It’s a good thing for a deteriorating area. That’s all the city should be worried about.
What I don’t agree with about the project, after a bit of reflection, is the mixture of low-income and median-income housing. That sort of plan won’t work. The low income earners/welfare cases drive away anybody else who would live in the area (which is the exact problem we face right now). Also, I don’t think that bringing more affordable housing will fix any amount of downtown issues. After all, it’s big business (read: business jobs, not service industry jobs) that drives tax revenue in the downtown core. This is why that making high density, higher end (thereby drawing the young professionals that are buying homes that create urban sprawl) housing projects in the downtown area should be a priority, not affordable housing. Besides, most of the service/low income jobs that exist in the downtown area are student jobs, so these students either live at home, or in residence, or, most likely in Clayton Park. That said, they’re usually not even around for 4 or 5 months of the year. Not an ideal situation, I agree, but again, service jobs don’t drive the economy, nor do they even really maintain it.
We need to make a choice. We either want downtown to not exist entirely, or we make it a focus. because clearly, we can’t have both.
I’ve lived in Dartmouth all my life as well, and I still consider downtown Halifax downtown – of course Dartmouth has a downtown too, to a lesser extent though does Bedford or Sackville.
That being said, if I were from Brooklyn, Brooklyn has a downtown as well, though obviously when people go to the city, they are going across the river – much like people in Dartmouth “going downtown” to Halifax”.
Relocating everything from Downtown Halifax all over the city and decentralizing everything isn’t going to happen, and I don’t think it is desirable either.
If affordable housing components work in every other major city in North America, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work in Halifax – are we really that “different” and “special”?
If we are special, it is in the spoon fed sense.
http://live.haligonia.ca/halifax-ns/commun…
Templeton Properties is doing their part – voluntarily – adding 10% affordable housing to their retrofit of Fenwick Towers. I guess if the ignoramuses at City Hall can’t do anything constructive with our tax payers dollars, luckily private developers are willing to do something with theirs.
Cantwell is as bad as the rest – he’s taken over 3 Halifax buildings recently with his own company, HRM Apartments and jacked tenants rents as much as $250. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that this is a guy with a “genuine concern for the working poor” he’s busy emptying out the buildings that he has just bought – some tenants have lived there for 25 years and in a matter of months they are basically put out because they can’t afford the rent increases. In the meantime these buildings have turned into construction sites that are hardly safe for the tenants with hallways and lobbies full of debris. Water is shut off 2-3 days a week with signs thanking the tenants for their patience and on at least two occasions the heat has been turned off to one of the buildings in January! He might be improving the buildings but raising the rents as much as %25 within months of taking over while renovations are ongoing and individual apartments haven’t been improved is just wrong. This guy doesn’t care about anyone but himself