Quote:
Originally Posted by fenwick16
I think that in most large cities business parks aren't identified as such, they are just large areas that are zoned industrial. If you have flown into the Toronto Pearson International Airport you will have seen many square miles of such industrial areas. It is a good measure of the health of a city, especially if the business parks are full of manufacturing and distribution warehouses that wouldn't normally be located in a city's downtown area.
Halifax needs lots of industrial areas (i.e. business parks) that are actually filled with manufacturing and distribution warehouses to provide jobs for people who want to live in the city.
|
I'm fine with *industrial* parks. They serve the function you note. The problem is that our business parks are not strictly industrial. Bayers Lake, Dartmouth Crossing, and even parts of Burnside, include significant retail and office space. That is what significantly hurt downtown, not legitimate warehouses and industrial operations.
And as for the size, let me quote connect2source:
Quote:
Originally Posted by connect2source
Totally agree, as I referenced, the Bayer's Lake and Dartmouth Crossing developments dwarf almost anything we have in metro Vancouver, a metro of 2.5M! No one should have allowed that sort of scale, especially during the peak of the big-box craze! In Vancouver, those types of developments were much further away, in fact the City of Vancouver only recently approved a Walmart within the city limits.
Downtowns are vital to a city's existence, soul and fabric and should never be put at risk. I'm glad it's on the rebound but it lost 20 - 30 years in the process.
|
As connect2source says, what we have in HRM "dwarfs" anything in Vancouver's metro area, which is literally 5 or 6X the size of Halifax Metro.
None of this is to discount that these parks have a role to play. They do. But we don't need the massive business parks we have. It's overkill. And our downtowns in Dartmouth and Halifax have paid a price. We're still trying to recover. It will probably take decades, if it ever happens.