^ I would be curious to see some of their proposed "options". The article makes it sound like the main alternatives to the current pace/nature of development are "less development" and "no development".
The reality is that we urgently need to find ways of improving the current systems while allowing for
more units to be created
at a higher pace and
at lower relative costs than they are now, not ways of making development more desirable or urbanistically perfect than it currently is at the expense of all of those things. As imperfect as things are here, development standards are generally very high compared to the national average - actual design requirements are high, and developers/architects err on the side of trying to impress people rather than going with the bare minimum allowed, at least post-2000. The fact that HRM has turned out, on the whole, to be a very nice environment to live in is a big factor driving the affordability/availability problems. I'm not even sure that the current market is "overvalued", I think it was somewhat undervalued for the last couple decades and in that time there has been tremendous investment in the public realm and much higher standards for new developments, while violent crime rates have gone down relative to the national average. We've succeeded in creating an attractive city that a lot of people want to move to, and fewer people want to leave, but policy has not done a good job of responding to that, and I think the next big wake-up call will be this August/September as thousands of students start trying to move here again, only to find out the vacancy rate is effectively 0. I think this will turn out to be critically bad but hopefully it will spur increased housing development, policy changes, and ideally the universities themselves will build more student housing (or even on-campus housing for staff/faculty).
I wish that groups like this would change their tone a bit towards actively promoting things like
backyard-and-secondary-suite-development rather than their current focus on actively opposing everything else. I do think there should be more regulations on building demolition and lot consolidation but I don't really think there should be additional regulations on what can be built for at least the next several years. Or maybe I'm being unfair here and it's the journalists who always ask them the wrong questions.
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Maybe Skye? Not holding my breath though!
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