Quote:
Originally Posted by Drybrain
I hope so too, but this wasn't exactly an infill project--they tore town a Georgian-era building for it.
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Another unfortunate side-effect of this type of development is that there are a bunch of historic rental buildings that are forever in a minimum maintenance holding pattern because their owners hope to one day cash in by redeveloping them.
The building across the street, 1360 Hollis, still looks like this. It's clad in beige vinyl siding and surrounded by 200 year old sandstone buildings and national historic sites.
It's great that the city is growing and experiencing development pressure but the municipality is doing a mediocre job of channeling this pressure into the right locations while protecting the character that makes the city interesting in the first place. I think Halifax has mostly just been "lucky" so far that there have been so many empty lots to redevelop. A lot of the remaining empty lots now are effectively land banks held by government and major institutions or companies (the province, Dalhousie, NSP, WDC, etc.). A bad but very possible scenario is that these will continue to languish as empty lots while developers start cannibalizing the nice adjacent built-out neighbourhoods because that is the only way to satisfy demand for downtown housing.