Quote:
Originally Posted by Hali87
It's kind of confusing but I think you're talking about 2 different sites here. St. Patrick's High School (defunct) is on Quinpool Road and seems to be abandoned but there haven't been any RFPs for the site (as far as I'm aware) and definitely no proposals. The building is mostly Art Deco architecturally and does not have any Victorian parts.
St. Pat's-Alexandra is on Brunswick Street and is the one that is currently tied up in legal battles. I have mixed feelings about what I'd like for that site, but I don't see this as the kind of site where it's like "if we don't build a tower here we will fail as a city". That neighbourhood is actually quite dense already (as is Quinpool) and I'm not convinced that adaptive reuse of either building (or parts of them) would be a bad thing - I'm more concerned about the fact that the buildings are both quite old and energy inefficient (and therefore costly to operate and maintain). Consider that ANY use of either building would be effectively increasing density because right now both buildings are being used for nothing.
As has been mentioned various times, you don't necessarily need to build towers to build dense. Many parts of the Halifax Peninsula (and even Clayton Park) are more densely populated than 95% of Edmonton or Calgary. I'm not against building towers, but I also think it's oversimplifying things to say that we "need" towers to curb suburban sprawl etc. What we need is actually a much more nuanced approach than that.
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yeah, I was thinking the St. Pat's on Quinpool and my comments apply more strongly there than at the other site, just due to location.
That said, I hear this a lot on here-- you don't have to build high to build dense. that is true, to a point. bBt to build dense then you need to... build dense. And in Halifax, we still don't. We have battles over 5 storey low density proposals in these areas as much as we battle over 15 storeys in the downtown core. There are a LOT of houses in those "dense" areas that are actually density killers; big single-unit low density households-- maybe some grandparents or boomers living in an empty nest.