Mountains of rubble piled high on Thursday morning at the same site where, less than a week ago, the former Bloomfield School stood. A hydraulic excavator sat parked inside temporary fencing off Agricola Street, its engine running. All around it, work crews shuffled about, cleaning up the wreckage from a weekend fire that tore through the long-vacant building in Halifax’s north end. The easternmost wing of the former Bloomfield School—a site that has been in limbo for years, kicked between the HRM, the province and private developers—is now gone. The rest of the crumbling building is still to follow.
And after that? A neighbourhood awaits the answer.
Bloomfield blaze a “tough battle” for fire crews
Fire broke out at the former Bloomfield School around 1:40am on Sunday, Feb 16. It spread quickly through the site’s northeastern annex, a two-storey brick building bordering Agricola Street. Haligonians captured video of flames leaping through empty windows. Smoke plumed across Agricola and through the city’s north end.
Speaking by phone with The Coast, Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency district chief Robert Hebb describes the blaze as a “three-alarm fire”—a term used for “significant” fires, often in multi-storey buildings, requiring a large response.
“It was a tough, tough battle for the crews,” he says, “given the weather and the conditions of that night.” Hebb adds that “around 44, 45 firefighters” responded to the Bloomfield fire, sticking around through “the bulk of the night” and carrying on through a shift change into the rest of Sunday. When The Coast arrived that day, the eastern annex still stood—though with a completely gutted interior. As of Thursday, little remains of the structure beyond scrap heaps.
Halifax Fire deputy chief Dave Meldrum told The Coast earlier this week that HRFE was bringing in a contractor to “remove some portions of the structure that are unsafe” so that crews could investigate the cause of the blaze.
“There are some unsupported walls there,” Meldrum added. “We haven’t been able to get in there and do the work of the fire investigation because those walls are unsecured.”
No firefighters were injured during the efforts to douse the flames. According to both Halifax Fire and Halifax Regional Police, no one else was reported injured. There had been initial concerns about the potential welfare of anyone who might have been sheltering inside the vacant school at the time, given the week-long cold snap and its history of unhoused Haligonians using it as an occasional shelter. Neither Halifax Fire nor HRP could confirm whether anyone had been sheltering in the Bloomfield School site at the time.
Long, contested history of Bloomfield Centre
The Bloomfield School closed in 1988. For years, it became a community centre and neighbourhood hub for the north end, occupied over the years by community groups and nonprofits—even as the HRM made plans several times to raze the aging buildings and start anew. In the early aughts, it looked like the Bloomfield Centre was destined for a wrecking ball. That prompted a chorus of calls to save buildings, led by the nonprofit group Imagine Bloomfield. Co-chair Susanna Fuller imagined the space as a “sustainable community arts centre”: a home for artists, nonprofits and other social enterprises that could follow the model of Toronto’s 401 Richmond and the Centre for Social Innovation.
“It’s not arts and culture,” Fuller told The Coast in 2011. “It’s arts and community.”
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Imagine Bloomfield’s vision caught the HRM’s attention, who hired architects to produce a master plan that, at one point, was meant to come to fruition as early as 2013. In 2012, Halifax council approved a $100-million redevelopment plan by Nova Scotia Housing Development Corporation—now Housing Nova Scotia—the provincial government’s affordable housing agency. The agency bid $15 million for the 1.5-hectare property and proposed a mix of market-rate housing with 40% affordable units. Fuller called it a “game-changer for how we develop public space,” where “community concerns are part of the plan.”
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But the sale was never finalized. And by 2016—even as Halifax was spending $11,000 a month to maintain the vacant buildings—Housing Nova Scotia backed out of its Bloomfield plans. The province’s then-community services minister, Joanne Bernard, wrote in a press release that the government made the call after listening to feedback from community stakeholders. Bernard added that “given the housing market and the city’s eagerness to move forward quickly,” the province was “confident” that a private developer would “be able to bring Bloomfield to life.”
Halifax councillors debated whether to sell the property to the highest bidder or work with Conseil Scolaire Acadien Provincial, who had expressed an interest in the site for a P-12 school on the peninsula. “It really comes down to who has the money,” then-councillor Lindell Smith told The Coast in 2017, “because the government tried to do it, and obviously that ship sank quite quickly.” Smith added that he’d “tried” to get Bloomfield back open for use, but insurance matters made it difficult. “Even the parking that was being offered, they had to get rid of that,” he said. A year later, the province passed—for the second time—on buying the former Bloomfield School, despite CSAP’s interest. A letter from the department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal cited “significant challenges” with the Bloomfield site, including its small size and urban location, which the department deemed to be a safety risk given the traffic on nearby streets.
Halifax developer Alex Halef bought the Bloomfield property from the HRM for $22 million in 2021. The BANC Group developer had previously built The Craigmore, The Mary Ann and Point North, three high-rise apartment buildings in the city. Halef told CBC News in 2021 that he would “have a design at some point this year without question.” Two years later, he told the HRM’s appeals committee he had “no timeline” for redeveloping the property, adding that it would cost him $2 million “just to demolish” the vacant buildings, and “there’s no plans completed yet.” Halef was facing a string of complaints about the derelict Bloomfield site, including “debris scattered around the property,” “insufficient” fencing to keep trespassers out of the building, graffiti on the walls and “open access through broken windows.” Halef told the committee that the Bloomfield site itself wasn’t unsafe but was made so by trespassers.
Bloomfield a fire risk, HRFE warns
On Oct 4, 2023, Halef got a phone call. On the other end of the line was Dustin Garnett, a fire inspector with HRFE. Garnett had concerns. He’d visited Bloomfield the day before and wrote in an email to his supervisor that the building was “not secure,” that there were two “unobstructed” points of entry and that there was “considerable risk” to people squatting inside the former school, in part because there were “portions of the facade that are failing.” On the phone, Garnett told Halef that fire crews would be in a position of “potentially hesitating” to enter the buildings should they catch on fire because of “questionable structural stability.” He worried that, as temperatures dropped, people would seek shelter in the vacant buildings. He told Halef he was concerned “there could be a fatality in the building” if there was ever an emergency. There were windows boarded. The Bloomfield buildings’ exterior was “showing signs of failure,” Garnett said.
Halifax Fire issued Halef an Order to Take Action the following day, on Oct 5. “Fire department access to the interior of the building in the event of a fire should not be made unduly difficult,” Garnett wrote in an email to Halef. “I would suggest that a main entry point be created that is not unduly difficult.”
Halef responded, “I’ll see what I can do here.” He appealed the order eight days later—which is why we know what Garnett and Halef spoke about on the phone and what their emailed correspondences were. All of it entered the public record—including emails from fire prevention officer Larry Varin, who emailed Garnett on Oct 4, cautioning him that “if you are going to make entry into this building, use extreme caution and adequate PPE.” Halifax Fire had investigated a fire at the Bloomfield site “about a year ago,” Varin added, “and due to unsafe conditions on the first floor we did not make entry.” Varin mentioned crews had found a “hole in the floor in the gym,” collapsed ceilings and “wire entanglements throughout the first floor.”
The HRM and Halef were scheduled to have a hearing in front of Nova Scotia’s Utility and Review Board in November 2023, but the two sides reached a deal before the hearing. Neither the HRM nor Halef’s lawyers have disclosed the terms of the deal. The Coast’s efforts to reach Halef by phone have not been returned.
As Bloomfield future in limbo, Halifax housing crisis rages on
Halifax Fire investigators haven’t determined what started Sunday morning’s fire. It isn’t clear whether the former school was being used as a shelter on that night, as it has been from time to time in seasons past—but it wouldn’t come as a surprise to those working on the frontlines of Halifax’s housing crisis. Street navigator Lucas Goltz, program coordinator of the Navigator Outreach Program in Halifax, tells The Coast that he knew of people who had lived in one of the Bloomfield’s buildings, “especially come wintertime, when freezing temperatures and ice all over the ground made it really uninhabitable to live out in tents in the encampments.” But all of the people Goltz knew had found housing, he says, and he “didn’t know of anyone” still sheltering there. (Halef had sought to secure the buildings from trespassers, but Garnett wrote in his work notes that Halef told him during their phone call that “people are always in there” and they “couldn’t be stopped,” no matter how many times he boarded the windows.)
Occupied or not, the Bloomfield site has long been a focal point in Halifax’s ongoing housing crisis: A site that, at one point in time, was destined to become affordable housing, only to sit vacant for years and become an illegal shelter for the city’s growing unhoused population as condos rose up around it, is now rubble. And still, its future hasn’t become any clearer since 2023, when its developer-owner said there was “no timeline” for redeveloping the vacant school-turned-community centre.
According to the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia’s By-Name List, a snapshot of Halifax residents who self-identify as unhoused, there are now 1,125 Haligonians who are “actively homeless.” That’s a decline from December’s peak of more than 1,200 Haligonians, but a fourfold increase from five years ago.
Goltz, who has worked with unhoused Haligonians for years—first with Shelter Nova Scotia, then Out of the Cold and now as one of roughly “seven or eight” street navigators across the HRM—tells The Coast that he’s seen a change in the demographics of people facing homelessness. While the majority of his clients in the past were dealing with addiction issues, mental health struggles or being laid off from work, he’s seeing more and more Haligonians who are out on the street because they’ve been renovicted, or they’re on disability assistance and couldn’t afford their housing anymore.
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“And so now they find themselves without housing in a time when there’s very little on the market,” Goltz adds. “I have a lot more people who are saying, ‘I just want to go back to what it was. I was living a fairly humble life, but I had my own apartment. I had food in the fridge.’”
The average price of a Halifax home in 2024 was $580,000, according to a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation report released this week. As of October, the city’s vacancy rate was at 2.1%—the highest it’s been in years, but still not enough to meet the growing demand for housing in a municipality that added nearly 60,000 residents between 2020 and 2024, per Statistics Canada. A 2023 report found that Halifax was short 17,500 housing units—and on pace to fall behind by 31,000 units by 2027.
Bloomfield alone won’t solve the city’s housing crisis. But neighbours are watching the site keenly to see what comes next.
“That’ll expedite things,” one onlooker said on Bloomfield Street after Sunday’s fire. Others murmured their agreement.
The Coast reached out to Halef to hear what will come next for the property at the corner of Agricola and Almon Streets. As of publication, we have not received a reply. The city’s sale agreement with Halef came with the condition that, if construction has not begun by January 2026, the HRM can buy the property back.
—With files from Jacob Boon and Chris Benjamin.
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This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.
Can we please get past this notion that Bloomfield must be an affordable housing site please? It wasn’t even a priority of the master plan, but rather a holistic component of the sites potential.
Take a minute and look at a map of Halifax. Very few large pieces of land exist and they should be kept for public spaces; rec centers, schools, green spaces, sports fields, etc. Affordable housing can and should be developed on the hundreds of available smaller lots scattered about the peninsula.