Halifax Population & Growth

[someone123]

Originally Posted by beyeas

I am sort of the opposite of the visitor you described in that I live in Halifax but have a cottage just outside Quebec City and spend a lot of time in both cities. But as such, I would say that if you only consider the old city core, Halifax feels not that far off of QC with less historical architecture left but actually more "big city" towers etc. It's when you leave the core that QC definitely has the feel of a much bigger city than Halifax. The density is more continuous and has more urban feel whereas Halifax switches to a suburban feel without too much distance from the core. Both certainly suffer in a mass transport sense from the impact their geography/geology have on their ability to efficiently deliver mass transit open to and from the core.

It's been a long time since I have been to Quebec City but it's interesting to me in that it's vaguely similar in scale and history (not like say Halifax vs. Montreal or Toronto) but the urban development went quite differently. I think it's much more interesting to contrast the cities than just say that they are from two different planets because of size.

In postwar Halifax it has been open season on building demolition in the old core, land assembly including multi-block and privatizing streets, etc. Quebec City has some of that but proportionally less and some untouched older parts. Then there is Laval and Sainte-Foy which absorbed a lot of development that Halifax has no real equivalent to. I wish Halifax had better preserved old parts like Quebec City, and I believe that it had the inventory to justify that, but I am not sure I'd want to replicate Ste-Foy in Halifax.

The Young St area with Richmond Yards is a bit like Ste-Foy in terms of layout (new stuff by bridge) but is more like a part of the old urban core. It is like how Ste-Foy would be if you slid the bridge to the east by a couple km.

I think in the long run the "peak" urban parts of Halifax are likely to be more vibrant because they'll have a density level that's not really possible in Quebec City. An area like Sackville and Barrington for all the progress made is still only maybe 60% of the way to the max density it could have within a few blocks.

Then on the other hand it seems like Quebec City is getting its tramway while Halifax is stuck at "maybe the province will fund nicer buses someday". It's hard to point to any major new piece of transportation infrastructure built in the last 30 years.

I am writing a novel here but the Province of Quebec and federal government also have wildly different visions of the kind of standard of investment in Quebec City vs. NS and the feds in Halifax.

[OldDartmouthMark]

Originally Posted by q12

Google Earth Pro for Desktop:

https://www.google.com/earth/versions/

Once installed click on view at the top ----> historical imagery.

Thanks! I'll give it a look!

[GreaterMontréal]

Then there is Laval and Sainte-Foy which absorbed a lot of development that Halifax has no real equivalent to.

Maybe you were talking about Lévis ? Sainte-Foy merged with Quebec City in 2002. Not even 75k people living in Sainte-Foy.

There are 6 boroughs, the six boroughs are further divided into 36 neighbourhoods.

Quebec City's urban population ; 705,103 , 427.66 km² : 1,648.7/km²
Halifax's urban population ; 348,634 , 238.29 km² : 1,463.1/km²

Halifax is about half the size of Quebec City, Hamilton or Winnipeg.

Laval is not part of the city of Montreal, whereas Sainte-Foy is part of Quebec City. There is no similarities between Laval and Lévis, the lather being a city of about 150,000, the largest suburb of Quebec City and on the south shore.

I don't think Halifax has a city similar to Lévis.

[beyeas]

Originally Posted by GreaterMontréal

Maybe you were talking about Lévis ? Sainte-Foy merged with Quebec City in 2002. Not even 75k people living in Sainte-Foy.

There are 6 boroughs, the six boroughs are further divided into 36 neighbourhoods.

Quebec City's urban population ; 705,103 , 427.66 km² : 1,648.7/km²
Halifax's urban population ; 348,634 , 238.29 km² : 1,463.1/km²

Halifax is about half the size of Quebec City, Hamilton or Winnipeg.

Laval is not part of the city of Montreal, whereas Sainte-Foy is part of Quebec City. There is no similarities between Laval and Lévis, the lather being a city of about 150,000, the largest suburb of Quebec City and on the south shore.

I don't think Halifax has a city similar to Lévis.

The loose "analogy" to Lévis would be Dartmouth, a former city that has since been absorbed into Halifax and is across a body of water from the old city of Halifax and is connected by bridge and ferry (with the difference being Lévis is still an independent municipality).

As I said above, I don't feel like the city core in QC is proportionally bigger than Halifax, and would argue they aren't massively different in size and scale, but are certainly different in historical preservation. But in QC it is the continuity of urban feel and density that remains a larger distance away from the core that is the difference. In Halifax it either falls off faster or has gaps between the core and other pockets of density (e.g. Bedford). Whereas if I head north from the old core of QC into, say Charlesbourg (which has lovely old neighbourhoods) the density is urban feel and density is pretty constant. Or even heading east toward Beauport. It is that continuity of urban density and feel that to me shows the size difference between QC and Halifax, not the core of the city itself.

[someone123]

I was trying to avoid a statistical argument of the style that pops up on SSP constantly and IMO doesn't explain anything (you can have an urban area of 700k with no downtown or interesting stuff at all). Qualitatively the cities are similar enough that you can certainly compare and contrast the different parts, and they followed different styles of development that have different trade-offs.

I don't think I would have chosen the path that was chosen for downtown Halifax but it offers a lot of flexibility today. They will likely not be approving rows of apartment buildings along the inner parts of Rue St-Jean in Quebec City. Those areas will remain lowrise.

I would add that the exurbs around Halifax don't really have a counterpart (and in some cases does not count as UA). Halifax has a lot of downtown development, a lot of exurban development (for Canada, but maybe it just matches what you find along the US east coast), and not much medium density suburbia.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by GreaterMontréal

Maybe you were talking about Lévis ? Sainte-Foy merged with Quebec City in 2002. Not even 75k people living in Sainte-Foy.

I meant the university. In Halifax the main universities feel more like they are in the urban core and not much of a separate pole from downtown. I would say it is more about amenities (schools or hospitals) or businesses and employment than population.

[q12]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

It is quite amusing to see the sensitivity of some to my innocuous comment.

A couple of points which I will make at my peril:

The HRM examples of this are Burnside, Bayers Lake, and the Larry Uteck area.

Both Burnside and Bayers were originally conceived as industrial parks. As such, both have an odd mix of low-traffic industrial businesses and high-traffic retail. This means both use undersized surface streets such as Wright Ave for access, and even newer areas such as Dartmouth Crossing with its joyous multilane 4-way stop intersections can be problematic. Then you have Uteck with its roundabouts and single-lane roadway. None of them are paragons of transportation design.

What I saw in Moncton seemed different. The growth had taken place in and around existing suburbs. There was much residential bordering the newer areas, most of which appeared to be preexisting. Somehow the city or province managed to build suitably-sized roadways for access amidst all that. Is it better or worse than HRM? I cannot say, although they certainly have done a better job of making the area accessible versus our examples of Wright Ave and the meandering Chain Lake Dr.. All I was saying was that the growth over the last 20 years was impressive. Take a breath.

Your realize that Halifax is built on bedrock with many lakes and natural terrain features including large ravines. Moncton on the other hand is basically sand and mud like P.E.I.

It's pretty easy in Charlottetown and Moncton to build a new road without any real restrictions because of topography. And it's cheaper since you don't have to blast.

Regardless I'm sure you could find lots of people in Moncton who visit Halifax once every 10 or 20 years that complain about why they don't do things in Moncton like the bigger city of Halifax.

Also don't forget to take stretch breaks in between complaining about how Halifax does everything wrong (especially in regards to roundabouts).

[Hali87]

Gatineau is probably the closest match for Dartmouth in terms of overall feel and "vintage". I've never really been to Lévis but I get the impression it's pretty different from that.

Moncton is also pretty comparable to Dartmouth (+Bedford/Sackville/Mainland) in most ways including the urbanity of its downtown, with Rue Main Street + environs feeling a bit more upscale and polished than anything in Dt Dartmouth at this point. The quality of new developments has been going up quickly there (roughly in parallel with Halifax, with similar design trends) and it's been growing rapidly. Housing is also a lot more affordable there than in Dartmouth, on average. It's a pretty attractive place for people who don't care about Peninsula-type stuff. It has the nicest arena and largest stadium in Atlantic Canada. U de Moncton is probably a bit more like U Laval in most ways than it is like UNB or Dal - it's not downtown-adjacent and there seems to be more of an emphasis on athletics (hence the stadium).

[GreaterMontréal]

Originally Posted by someone123

I meant the university. In Halifax the main universities feel more like they are in the urban core and not much of a separate pole from downtown. I would say it is more about amenities (schools or hospitals) or businesses and employment than population.

Quebec City is so old that the city was already full in the early 1940's and they had to create another ''downtown'' to accomodate for new growth.

Given that the topography of Halifax is very different than what you would find in southern Quebec, it makes total sense to concentrate all the amenities in the downtown core (Halifax).

La Cité-Limoilou is the central borough of Quebec City, the oldest (in terms of architecture), and the most populous, comprising 21.85% of the city's total population. 22.2km² , pop. 106k

[teddifax]

I don't know if this is where to post it, but here goes....
I was just wondering... if Bill 225 goes through, is it possible that this law could invalidate the view planes bylaw as part of its aggressive growth demands. I think that law has outlived its usefulness, not that it was ever really needed - the only view that ever needed saving was out to the mouth of the harbour.

[Keith P.]

Meanwhile, readers of the Herald were blessed today with a long missive from Kommissar Howard Epstein about the decline of single-family homes on the peninsula:

https://www.saltwire.com/halifax/opinion...er-occupied-houses-in-halifax-100790414/

Of course he uses that to decry the development of DT Halifax et al along with general grousing about things in general. There are so many Howie gems in this that is hard to extract any single part to post here to give you a taste of the column. But this sort of jumps out:

The overbuilding of offices and the overbuilding of apartment buildings are of a different sort.

With overbuilt offices, there are vacancies, declines in value of the underutilized buildings and then their owners pay less tax, shifting the tax burden to others.

With overbuilt apartments, there are no vacancies because people will be forced to take what is available just for a place to live. Owner-occupied housing becomes scarcer, prices are driven up: this is inflationary, interest rates are raised, and mortgage and tax charges go up. Life becomes unaffordable because the market has not offered people what they want.

Shannon Park is ideal for a new subdivision of family homes. The Cogswell Interchange is now being redeveloped. Exhibition Park is being looked at. The whole area that is Woodside/Shearwater/Eastern Passage could accommodate owner-occupied housing. So, too, could the former RCMP land on Bayers Road. No more apartment buildings should be allowed to be built until those various large, central areas are used to redress the nature of the housing supply. And that supply should include modest starter homes, not only mansions.

[worldlyhaligonian]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

Meanwhile, readers of the Herald were blessed today with a long missive from Kommissar Howard Epstein about the decline of single-family homes on the peninsula:

https://www.saltwire.com/halifax/opinion...er-occupied-houses-in-halifax-100790414/

Of course he uses that to decry the development of DT Halifax et al along with general grousing about things in general. There are so many Howie gems in this that is hard to extract any single part to post here to give you a taste of the column. But this sort of jumps out:

Completely out of touch. We're in the crises because of this faux activism and the mention of the RCMP site is laughable - a school is being built there.

I wonder - could there be a class action lawsuit against him and these groups for holding up much needed development?

Also - why can't children be raised in a larger format condo or apartment.

Where does he live in the city? I'd imagine it is a million dollar plus house.

[Hali87]

He mentions condos a couple times but overall really seems to conflate building types with ownership types. His interpretation only really makes sense in a world with house forms that are owner-occupied and apartment block/tower forms that are rented. This is not really how things work here and a large proportion of houses are rentals (either as a whole house or as multiple apartments).

[q12]

Nova Scotia’s immigration allocation for 2022 increased to 5,430 from 3,857, a 41 per cent increase in overall allocations between the Provincial Nominee
Program and Atlantic Immigration Program

Nova Scotia experienced a record number of landings in 2021 with 9,160 arrivals and has already exceeded this in 2022 with 9,375 arrivals as of August

https://novascotia.ca/news/release/?id=20221108002

[Keith P.]

"Hey, here's a good idea... let's make the housing shortage even worse!"

[bartekci]

Growing pains for Nova Scotia. We desperately need immigrants to increase our economic output and grow the labour force. Lots of retired or near-retired folk in this province that are going to need more care. All the skills coming from young immigrants are absolutely necessary.

It's interesting to see this happening here after being a have-not province for so long. It's going to be a hard few years for a selection of people but the long-term looks positive.

[Empire]

Originally Posted by fatscat

Growing pains for Nova Scotia. We desperately need immigrants to increase our economic output and grow the labour force. Lots of retired or near-retired folk in this province that are going to need more care. All the skills coming from young immigrants are absolutely necessary.

It's interesting to see this happening here after being a have-not province for so long. It's going to be a hard few years for a selection of people but the long-term looks positive.

Agree.
HRM / NS is playing a catch-up game as usual. There is a significant emphasis on immigration and migration which is great for the region and province. The difficulty is that we are so far behind in planning. The unofficial target is to reach 2 million people by 2060 which translates into 1 million for HRM. Essentially, every town/city in NS would have to double in size. Geography is a major factor in the expansion of traditional small towns in NS. The HRM – airport – Truro corridor should be promoted as a high growth area. Other major factors are employment opportunities and healthcare. Is the NS government relying on people working remotely with their employer located elsewhere in Canada or beyond?
An attractive business climate needs to be promoted. In the past, offshore oil and gas development faced a sea of red tape and now we have the result, no offshore activity at all. All of those royalties have disappeared. The next opportunity is offshore wind energy but as usual this is decades in the making. When the Halifax Infirmary was constructed in the mid 90’s there was no provision for vertical expansion. The building should have incorporated columns / rebar to allow for additional floors. Now the new expansion has to occupy a large footprint and is undersized before a shovel hits the ground so it’s back to the drawing board. As an interim measure, add a large expansion to the Dartmouth General until a suitable plan for the Infirmary can be configured. Height restrictions have to be modified to allow for more density to relieve the pressure on urban sprawl and demolition. Gridlock is looming on the peninsula so 10 years ago was the time to plan for LRT/monorail/subway.

[teddifax]

Unfortunately, Halifax, as much as I love it, has NEVER been known for any kind of advance planning!

[Arrdeeharharharbour]

Originally Posted by teddifax

Unfortunately, Halifax, as much as I love it, has NEVER been known for any kind of advance planning!

Something to remember come election time.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by Arrdeeharharharbour

Something to remember come election time.

Throw the bums out!