Quote:
Originally Posted by Hali87
Sydney has been pretty stagnant for the last couple decades but I think the area will start to grow significantly again as infrastructure in Cape Breton is upgraded and Halifax deals with shocks to its housing market. I would say it's completely overlooked at the national level and often even at the regional level, but it's a metro of ~100,000 with its own airport, seaport, university, college campuses, in a nice location next to the Bras D'or Lakes and Highlands National Park.
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Cape Breton (do people still talk about "Industrial Cape Breton"?) experienced severe economic malaise starting in about the 1970's and this seems to have translated into a general feeling that everything there sucks and that's just the way of things but I'm not sure it will be true in the future. The economy around 2000 was a result of an acute lack of employment due to steel mill and coal mine closures.
The Sydney area is interesting in that it followed an industrial boom and bust pattern similar to the rustbelt of the US. It is not as old as most other Atlantic cities (1700's and early 1800's buildings) but it boomed around the 1890-1930 period and had 100,000 people in the 1930's. It looks like most people in the metro even today live in pre-war blocks. So today it has an abundance of dirt cheap potentially walkable neighbourhoods and it is in one of Canada's most scenic/outdoorsy areas (not right in the city but not far away).
The downtown is pretty depressing compared to what it was. If you made a top 10 list of buildings from 1930 I'd guess that only a couple are still standing. But it could be improved pretty easily with some infill. It also has a bunch of old brick and stone buildings that are in bad shape. I wish NS would create a "main street" program to help with that; not just focus on the oldest or most touristy buildings but the ones residents see regularly.