Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
Or Halifax could simply evolve to a more user-friendly, more transient identity where no one is considered to be "from away" and you're a Haligonian almost from the moment you move there. All of which is quite typical of Canada west of the Ottawa River, but historically not as common in Atlantic Canada.
Halifax would obviously be the first place in Atlantic Canada to truly transition towards this modern Canadian civic identity.
I'd actually bet on that. It's probably already happening to some degree.
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Absolutely I'd say that's the paradigm we're in at this point. I meant more that there are nevertheless cases where it's useful to have an all-encompassing term for people who chose to move to [wherever "here" is], in statistical analysis for example, not so much for calling people that to their face (although I guess maybe you don't get one without the other).
I'd argue that Halifax is already a very transient city, and as much as I like to think of this city as "mature" or even "worldly", there is an underlying cultural belief here that no one should have to leave their homes just because they don't have enough money (the city was, at least in principle, extremely cautious about anything that might look like gentrification for the decades when I was growing up, and THE guiding policy principle was "make it so that anyone can remain in their geographically tiny neighbourhood from cradle to grave if they so choose while also living a full and productive life".
Great in principle, but the city never considered what would happen if land values suddenly "corrected" across the entire municipality at once. And once that started happening, those principles became the source of the new problems that we're facing now (compounded by the fact that they generally resulted in "very nice places to live", which makes more people more willing to spend more money to move here).
On the desk of a salaried Chief Planner (or tenured Planning/Architecture/Policy prof, etc), a walkable, bikeable city with no true down-and-out areas, usable transit, nice public facilities and landscaping, bespoke architecture with built-in mitigation against wind and shadows, excellent snow clearance capacity that is only really used about 7 days each year, ~0 SROs or cheap hotels, nicely preserved neighbourhoods made up of 250-year-old-wooden buildings, good wastewater treatment and strong environmental regulations, with information available in as many languages as possible and as much free everything for everyone as possible... that's undeniably a good thing.
But for the average person who has started building a life there, what good are all these things if the next step in the process is that they have to move somewhere that is more affordable (by virtue of being the opposite of most/all of that)? Given that I grew up during the decades of strong anti-gentrification, "causing people to have to move is the worst thing a society can do" messaging, it's hard for me to be like, "oh, right, the natural way of things is that people move from city to city all the time based on finances, and why would anyone ever expect to live in one place indefinitely?"
(Plus, I just like it here, and many of the things that I like about it are a direct result of work that my generation (including me) has put in, just to make the place that we live in a better place. I guess the punchline is that yeah, this does sort of happen everywhere all the time, and we just failed to realize that, and were too focused on "how things should be" to notice all of the "how things are".)
Certainly, over time, corporations might flourish there ("it's where our employees and/or executives want to live", etc.) which might bring higher-paying job opportunities to people who grew up expecting to live their lives there, allowing them to remain. But this part hasn't really happened here yet in any major way - there's the Shipbuilding Program, but that can't really be seen as a solution to
what's happening now.
The obvious solution is just to build much more housing, more quickly than we have been (and maybe even lower our standards a *tiny* bit), but this has not really been happening either, it is always "on the horizon" as the pace of construction continues to gradually trend upward (though very few of the buildings are "totally straightforward", and many are "luxury" residences with frivolous amounts of square footage per room/unit) while the population skyrockets in comparison, largely squeezing into older buildings that will inevitably be redeveloped soon and replaced with much more expensive, state-of-the-art ones.
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