Development Rumours

[Keith P.]

Considering that Halifax Water, everyone's second-favorite out-of-touch public utility, just announced water restrictions for Dartmouth for the 5th or 6th time in the last decade, maybe the building should include a desalination and harbour water treatment plant in the sub-basement for all those residents to use. Just ridiculous.

[Saul Goode]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

water restrictions for Dartmouth for the 5th or 6th time in the last decade

Really? Why don't I remember that - at all? I've lived in Dartmouth since...well, since long before that.

[hoser111]

Originally Posted by Saul Goode

Really? Why don't I remember that - at all? I've lived in Dartmouth since...well, since long before that.

2016 & 2018 so yeah, 5 or 6 times!

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by hoser111

2016 & 2018 so yeah, 5 or 6 times!

2016 before that, and last year as well. Memories must be suffering from lack of watering.

[HalifaxRetales]

I heard this week that local cranes are booked out for 5 years

anyone know if that is true ?

[Dartguard]

Originally Posted by HalifaxRetales

I heard this week that local cranes are booked out for 5 years

anyone know if that is true ?

A friend of mine retired from a major local architecture firm about two years ago and his firm still had ten years of projects ready to go.So

[Musicman Halifax]

Originally Posted by HalifaxRetales

I heard this week that local cranes are booked out for 5 years

anyone know if that is true ?

I’ve heard similar rumblings. Slowly we are gathering more cranes in the city. There are 2 new to the city companies and from what I am told they are quite large. (The names escape me but one has a crane up on gottigen and the other in Dartmouth). From what I understand is if they see growth potential here they will add more resources to grow their businesses here. The only issue with that is for every 2 cranes you need a new crew to do concrete and that is a bottleneck as well.

[Dmajackson]

This might be land banking or a development could be imminent;

5521-5535 SULLIVAN STREET, HALIFAX had demolition permits issued this week. This backs onto the vacant lot at 5530 KAYE STREET which fronts the Hydrostone Market retail area (on the non-historic south side of the park). The lots total 10'800 sq ft with two street frontages and it has Corridor zoning.

Google Streetview

The most likely outcome is a 7-storey building with ~60 units. Nothing spectacular, I just hope they include retail along Kaye Street and design it well since Hydrostone Market is a key landmark.

[Summerville]

Originally Posted by Dmajackson

This might be land banking or a development could be imminent;

5521-5535 SULLIVAN STREET, HALIFAX had demolition permits issued this week. This backs onto the vacant lot at 5530 KAYE STREET which fronts the Hydrostone Market retail area (on the non-historic south side of the park). The lots total 10'800 sq ft with two street frontages and it has Corridor zoning.

Google Streetview

The most likely outcome is a 7-storey building with ~60 units. Nothing spectacular, I just hope they include retail along Kaye Street and design it well since Hydrostone Market is a key landmark.

This is another Tsimklis tear down. It was in Allnovascotia. It’s land banking…although he did say that he has backers, which suggests there is a group that may include developers and Tsmiklis swings the hammer.

The city seems to be too occupied with infilling of Dartmouth Cove.

[worldlyhaligonian]

Originally Posted by Summerville

This is another Tsimklis tear down. It was in Allnovascotia. It’s land banking…although he did say that he has backers, which suggests there is a group that may include developers and Tsmiklis swings the hammer.

The city seems to be too occupied with infilling of Dartmouth Cove.

What's the issue here? These are incredibly ugly houses.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by worldlyhaligonian

What's the issue here? These are incredibly ugly houses.

Haven’t you heard? All developers are greedy and evil according to many in this burg.

[OldDartmouthMark]

Originally Posted by worldlyhaligonian

What's the issue here? These are incredibly ugly houses.

Maybe tearing down houses that people could live in, to be left as vacant lots potentially for years? Why is this not an issue?

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark

Maybe tearing down houses that people could live in, to be left as vacant lots potentially for years? Why is this not an issue?

This is the issue. Tsimiklis' is not a developer, he's a demolisher. His MO is to buy buildings, usually perfectly good ones, evict the people living in them, then tear them down. Then he doesn't build anything. He squats on the empty land, sometimes for years, while he tries to fob it off on a real developer. The guy is a menace, actively making the city worse every time he does almost anything. It's unbelievable (but not, actually) that this kind of land-banking of vacant properties hasn't been discouraged with punitive taxation or some other means. There are properties he acquired on Young Street more than a decade ago that are still empty.

[worldlyhaligonian]

Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark

Maybe tearing down houses that people could live in, to be left as vacant lots potentially for years? Why is this not an issue?

Aesthetically, they are ugly IMO. The one next to those being torn down is the only nice house on that side of the street.

I'd rather see that space ready for eventual redevelopment... no matter how long the wait.

Judging from the outside, I don't know how habitable they are at present, and if they were, there would be like 10 people living in this space maximum. Doesn't seem like good land use.

But, hey, you guys can group-think all you want. It would seem that different opinions are no longer welcome on this forum.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

This is the issue. Tsimiklis' is not a developer, he's a demolisher. His MO is to buy buildings, usually perfectly good ones, evict the people living in them, then tear them down.

He's partly wrecked Young Ave and those lots have been vacant for a decade now. Many other developers in Halifax manage to thoughtfully reuse historic buildings by building additions and building on unused portions of lots.

I don't really see this kind of demolition much in other cities. It makes Halifax look a bit like Detroit or Buffalo when actually it is booming. It's similar with all the abandoned institutional sites (library, St. Pat's-Alexandra, etc.).

Part of the problem is the property tax system which gives developers a discount if they make the property worse and a big windfall if the zoning density goes up. Squatting on land while providing no value to society can be more profitable under this system than productive development activity. But I also wonder if there is some kind of cultural quirk in Halifax, tolerance for ugliness, and additional Kafkaesque bureaucracy and dreary political inaction that makes this all even worse. The local media also seem to just go along with whatever people say, whether it's that some building can't be saved (virtually every older building in Halifax is unsalvageable for some reason), "not economically viable", or there's some complex conundrum around reuse.

[someone123]

I just happened to read a bit more about the library while on the subject of general lack of wherewithal in the city as far as maintaining an attractive urban environment:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scot...honour-forgotten-burial-ground-1.7510082

The coverage has the usual issues:
- Nobody has any clue what will happen and a consultant will be paid $100k for a study about it, which is probably a significant sum of money relative to the maintenance costs of the building.
- No planning about this obvious issue happened during the decades before/after the new central library was built.
- Abstract, incoherent debate continues. There are people buried there (not too surprisingly Mi'kmaq, who have been in NS for thousands of years, so are probably buried in a lot of places), so maybe we can't disturb them, but the building should be demolished, but maybe it'll disturb them, and on and on.
- Little attention to actual needs of the city, what land use makes sense for living people today, what important character the living people care about and want preserved, etc.

I think the norm in a lot of cities would just be to make the old library some sort of community space and minimally maintain the building, which is not the Taj Mahal and will not cost that much to operate. Maybe it could become a civic museum; apparently most HRM archival stuff is out in Burnside.

Another norm I would say is that if there are human remains and unmarked graves, they can be excavated and respectfully moved and a memorial created somewhere. It's not normal to consider large areas of city untouchable because of remains.

[Summerville]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

Haven’t you heard? All developers are greedy and evil according to many in this burg.

Typical Keith generalization. I'm all for height and development. I love what's happening on Robie Street and in the neighbourhood next to Stad.

But as others have stated, this group is able to demolish buildings before any particular design is submitted to the city. And they demolish the buildings immediately so that no one can stop them...and as well so that their tax assessment is based on the vacant parcel.

Anecdotally, these crappy buildings are the only way that young families can buy into the north end. I know of a couple that finally "lucked out", but they admit that they have work to do.

Keith,...you will no doubt complain about the finished building in the end. I will put money on it.

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by worldlyhaligonian

I'd rather see that space ready for eventual redevelopment... no matter how long the wait.

Leaving the buildings intact and inhabited for the time being doesn't preclude future development. It's not as if they need to be torn down right now so that some hypothetical future developer can act slightly faster when redeveloping.

It's not normal practice, in this or any other city, to rip down houses speculatively and sit on the land for years.

[OldDartmouthMark]

Originally Posted by worldlyhaligonian

Aesthetically, they are ugly IMO. The one next to those being torn down is the only nice house on that side of the street.

I'd rather see that space ready for eventual redevelopment... no matter how long the wait.

Judging from the outside, I don't know how habitable they are at present, and if they were, there would be like 10 people living in this space maximum. Doesn't seem like good land use.

But, hey, you guys can group-think all you want. It would seem that different opinions are no longer welcome on this forum.

1) I don’t see why aesthetics is being entered into the conversation. There are a lot of buildings that subjectively could be called ugly, some new in fact, but are functionally fine for housing people. These appear to be inhabited, so in a city that is still being plagued by a lack of affordable housing options, it is counterproductive to the livability and function of the city that these are to be torn down in order to save money for the owner while he waits to achieve maximum profitability for the land. With all of the effort that governments have been putting into getting buildings built to house people, this is the exact opposite action, and frankly it surprises me that the government still keeps that tax loophole available to allow this type of activity to happen. If we do want to bring aesthetics into the conversation, IMHO a house with people living in it that helps bring vibrancy and economic activity to the neighbourhood is much more attractive than an empty lot, even if it were landscaped and maintained (which it won’t be).

2) Call it group-think if you wish (laughable when referring to one of my posts IMHO, but whatever), but sometimes an opinion is just objectively more logical, and thus popular. I would suggest that perhaps it is you who appears to not accept differing opinions, but that’s just my take. I’m just giving my opinion on your opinion… as one might expect on a discussion forum.

[someone123]

It's worth noting that developers have an incentive to save on maintenance costs and run down properties before they tear them down. So the ugliness is often a creation of the developer. Structural and functional problems can also be due to deferred maintenance. As a simple example, if you don't fix a roof for 40 years, a house might become dilapidated. This is often conflated with "end of life" of the building, which is not a real thing for these houses, or "not economically viable", which is just not true in a city where modest wooden boxes bring in thousands a month in rent.

All around the city you can see a huge range in attractiveness and quality of what originally would have been comparable houses. Cities, I think, need some kind of solution to demolition by neglect or willful deterioration. And property ownership should be a two-way street, not a one-way ticket to windfall cash payouts without responsibility. Much of the value of an urban property is not created by the owner.