Quote:
Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark
Same ol' same ol'. We are broke. We can't afford it.
|
This may have been true at one time but I think it's objectively untrue now, at least if you compare against other provinces:
http://www.rbc.com/economics/economic-reports/pdf/canadian-fiscal/prov_fiscal.pdf
If you look at a mix of budget deficit and debt to GDP, NS is one of the best provinces. BC is better off. ON and QC are worse. AB was better off and has low debt but they're running huge deficits. I formulate my opinion of NS finances by looking at this data. HRM has low debt.
In any case I think this is a red herring because if you travel to Mexico, Cuba, or just about anywhere in Europe (including Spain, Eastern Bloc, etc.) you can find better preserved heritage buildings. I'm not sure what everybody's vision is but I doubt that better maintenance of buildings actually costs that much per year in the scheme of things. I'd guess that for the price of 1 hockey rink HRM could have run a program that would have substantially overhauled a significant portion of buildings in a poor state of repair over the past decade or two. This may also have led to higher assessments so it's unclear if it would have been a net loss. I don't think having dumpy buildings helps the municipality's bottom line.
I don't know what the situation is today but it seems to me like there isn't a lot more heritage restoration work today than there was in the early 2000's even though the city is larger and more successful, with higher property values today. This is how things played out in Vancouver too. There are neighbourhoods with sky-high slum properties where the owners make a killing as the buildings degrade. All they care about is the appreciation of the land price, and seemingly paradoxically the incentive to speculate and operate slum properties can go up as a city becomes more desirable. If the city and province don't step in to fix it the old buildings crumble.
Threaded Mode