Please Take Immediate Action To Get a Better Housing Plan For HRM
Dear Friends of Heritage and Friends of HRM:
As some of you may know, HRM Council is proposing to make a massive number of changes to the planning bylaws that determine the size, scale and nature of housing that can be built in HRM. In a nutshell, they are proposing to throw out much of the Centre Plan that was just approved within the last few years, after thousands of hours of community consultations. Council is doing this because the Federal government is dangling $80 million from the federal Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF) in front of them and essentially forcing them to change the rules if they want the money.
The Feds have done the same thing across the country – trying to force cities to adopt the same planning rules. The major problem is that urban planning doesn’t work that way. What might work in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, or Mississauga isn’t the same as what will work in Montreal, Quebec City, Charlottetown, or Halifax. But the Feds and HRM don’t really seem to care if the new rules make sense – they developed a “one-size fits all” plan and seem to be more interested in creating photo ops of politicians making announcements about new housing units than in actually creating a plan that works.
The $80 million will be paid over four years – $20 million per year. What is important to remember is that, based on an average cost of $185 per square foot, and an average size of 1500 ft2 per home, the $80 million will cover the cost of building fewer than 300 new houses – certainly not enough to have significant effect on the 52,050 housing units needed in HRM by 2027 https://cdn.halifax.ca/sites/default/files/documents/business/planning-development/final-hrm-municipal-report-clean-23nov28.pdf, and certainly not enough to throw away the years of hard work that went into developing the Centre Plan.
Other city councils have shown more backbone.
Windsor, Ontario, decided to say no to the rules that the Feds tried to force on them. Even though it meant losing millions of dollars in funding, Windsor just decided they weren’t just going to adopt a set of arbitrary rules that didn’t fit with their city’s vision for its future. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/windsor-haf-bduget-motion-1.7091482.
Charlottetown Council pushed back until they got the necessary protections for their historic downtown. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-charlottetown-federal-housing-money-1.6997212.
Just last week in Calgary, over 700 people lined up to speak at the public hearing about that City’s HAF proposal. There were so many people wanting to speak, the hearing stretched out over two weeks https://storeys.com/calgary-citywide-rezoning-public-hearings/
In Halifax, our elected officials seem prepared to turn their backs on the long-term vision for growth just approved in the Centre Plan and violate the trust residents placed in that plan – one that gave them some degree of certainty about what could be built in their neighbourhoods. As you can see from the attached open letter, a coalition of well-regarded planning professionals, academics and community groups have serious doubts that HRM’s plan will succeed in doing what it’s supposed to do. Even more concerning, they believe HRM’s HAF plan will make the affordable housing situation even worse, destroying more heritage homes that provide affordable housing now and destroying some of the best qualities that make Halifax such a great place to live.
This coalition of groups and individuals started a petition to ask HRM and the Federal government to take a step back and develop a better plan for addressing HRM’s housing crisis – a plan that makes sense for Halifax. I hope you will sign the petition and share it with as many people as possible.
If you live in downtown Halifax/Dartmouth, it will be obvious to you why this is so important. If the current HAF plan is approved, it won’t be long before you can’t recognize the neighbourhoods where you live and work. For those of you who don’t live in Central Halifax/Dartmouth, this should matter to you, too, because the rules apply to all areas – urban or rural. If HRM Council can just throw out an approved plan for the urban core that residents put thousands of hours of time into, they can just as easily do the same for plans that are approved for your area.
There is a lot at stake here and we need to demand a better plan from our elected officials and planning department. The public hearing to consider the HAF proposal is scheduled for Tuesday, May 21, beginning at 1:00 p.m.
Please sign the petition ASAP by clicking on this link: https://chng.it/CtyPk8ggtf
Please forward this message to everyone you know who lives in HRM. This matters to all of us. And remember, our deadline is May 21 – this coming Tuesday.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for taking action.
Best regards,
Sandra Barss
President, Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia
