Quote:
Originally Posted by RyeJay
The speakers warned that if Halifax stays on course with its sprawl, we could end up being another boring Buffalo, New York.
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I would take that with an enormous grain of salt.
It's great to have people from other places come to Halifax and talk about their experiences. Sometimes, however, these people make pronouncements about Halifax without knowing much about the local context. Planners are also particularly bad for presenting "soft" arguments without a lot of facts to back them up.
Halifax isn't completely unique by any stretch but it also doesn't have much in common with Rust Belt cities like Buffalo. The biggest problem in Buffalo and the US Rust Belt is deindustrialization, not suburban sprawl. The most important part of the economy picked up and moved elsewhere. Halifax was barely affected by this trend because it has almost zero manufacturing. It seems like a big stretch to think that continuing the status quo in Halifax will produce the same results, particularly when the urban population is still growing substantially...