[Stephen Cooke | Posted: April 9, 2022] While a portable speaker played the sound of Joni Mitchell singing “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” Haligonians dismayed by the recent destruction of historic homes on Robie Street gathered in front of the rubble-strewn site across from Camp Hill Cemetery.
Organized by the citizens’ group Development Options Halifax, the rally at the corner of Robie and Bliss streets was held to make residents aware of impending changes to the neighbourhood, and to request they take action against ongoing developments that are changing the character of the city at the expense of affordable housing, the environment and reducing congestion on its streets.
DOH member Larry Haiven asked the two dozen or so attendees to contact their Halifax councillors and provincial MLAs to voice their concerns about the changing face of Halifax, as options for public consultation regarding changes to the urban landscape continue to shrink.
He’s especially concerned about legislation tabled this week by provincial Housing Minister John Lohr, which would amend the Halifax Regional Municipality charter designed to streamline the approval process for residential development by bypassing community councils or advisory committees, including the Heritage Advisory Committee, which makes recommendations about heritage buildings and streetscapes.
In the case of the block on Robie Street, the now-vacant lot is owned by Halifax developer George Tsimiklis, whose company also purchased and demolished a pair of historic estates on Young Avenue in 2016 to the outrage of residents of the stately south-end neighbourhood. At the north end of the Robie block, on the corner of Binney Street, another building now owned by Tsimiklis is surrounded by construction fencing and looks like it too will fall victim to a backhoe in the near future.
Initially, Haiven didn’t think there would be much desire to tear the century-old houses down, with the 11-metre height restriction currently in place, but where there were four homes with backyards will likely become one solid building with many more tenants.
“The Centre Plan allows developers to go back, almost to the property line, so they densify it,” he said. “We didn’t realize that there would be such an incentive there — rather than renovating and keeping these beautiful houses that used to be here — to just get rid of them and build something new.”
DOH members acknowledge the need for more housing in Halifax, preferably in a range that people currently living on the peninsula can afford, and DOH organizer Peggy Cameron tells the crowd that the city should have taken action to ensure developments that fit that model were built on land currently sitting idle, like the former site of St. Pat’s High School on Quinpool Road or the Bloomfield School property in north-end Halifax.
As for what Haiven expects to see take the place of the Robie Street houses, he doesn’t have high hopes for what will be constructed there, predicting the kind of anonymous, budget-minded buildings that fill available spaces across North America.
“More steel and glass, more ugly and unimaginative — I wouldn’t even call it modernist — development. If this were designated, it doesn’t even have to be a heritage conservation district, it could be a streetscape to maintain it the way it was,” he said.
“Then there are incentives for the developer not to tear the whole thing down. The developer in Schmidtville at 1320 Queen St. was given permission to build onto the back, and decided to keep the original flavour of the place, and that’s what we should have here. A grand old street with a boulevard in the middle and beautiful old houses … and it’s all going to be gone.”
The Robie and Bliss corner is familiar turf for DOH, just a stone’s throw from the corner of Robie and Spring Garden, the site of a proposed development it has vocally opposed in the past where Cameron says having two 30-storey towers, plus two more of similar scale on the same block, will have more height, scale and mass than downtown’s Nova Centre.
Besides removing roughly 110 affordable housing and commercial units from the neighbourhood, the Spring Garden/Robie projects will generate 31,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
Cameron said just replacing the floor area of the 12 to 14 buildings that will be demolished will emit more than 2,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases, which she called both unnecessary and harmful. The emissions would almost equal the annual amount saved by Nova Scotia banning plastic bags.
One attendee at the rally, Linda Scherzinger, a resident of the neighbourhood for the past 14 years, was dismayed when she viewed the destruction of the houses and doesn’t look forward to more construction and congestion that will forever change the area she’s called home since moving to Halifax from Cape Breton.
“It was incredible, a big machine literally just biting and eating up building after building, and I don’t know what kind of structures are going to be here, but it’s going to be a different kind of addition. Besides the loss to the neighbourhood, I think it will be less inviting,” she sighed.
“I know they think it’s a main thoroughfare and therefore deserves bigger buildings, but I think they’re making some assumptions about what is attractive to people who come to the city. That’s unfortunate, because we want people to feel good about coming into the city.”