Quote:
Originally Posted by Waye Mason
You should know that what your suggesting is out of date since 1996. Municipalities in Nova Scotia have no role in building affordable housing beyond planning. This was changed when the Municipal Reform Act was adopted around the same time as amalgamation.
Housing NS is responsible for purchasing land and building/subsidizing affordable housing. Halifax does planning, so you see things like Bloomfield Master Plan that required a large affordable housing component.
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By 'providing' I was referring to using the planning process.
We don't know how profitable the development industry has been. We don't know if they pay federal income tax, which is quite legal, but until HRM gets serious about negotiating we will never know just how profitable they are and how much we can extract in the way of benefits. A bit late now - the market is terrible, maybe more developers will have to use a subsidiary to buy up and mortgage their unsold units.
When I worked for the province I read several years of an annual report before sitting down with an oil company, rig company, supply vessel company representative. The Yanks were fine, the Canadians were much more arrogant.