[Halifax] The Azal (383 Herring Cove Road) | 20 m | 7 fl | Completed

[Dmajackson]

This is not likely to get past initiation on Tuesday but it is quite a bit different than it's neighbours;

Case 20102 - 383 Herring Cove Road

It's 84-unit, 7-storey mixed-use building for Spryfield just south of South Centre Mall.

[Dmajackson]

I've created a thread for this project since it is definitely large-scale for its area and because a encroachment permit was just issued for 383 Herring Cove Road.

This project sort of flew under the radar. Only one person spoke at the public hearing in November 2018 and they were in favour. Regional Council approved a new zone to be created specifically for this property to allow for a seven storey multi-unit residential building.

[someone123]

I used to live in the mainland south area many moons ago (closer in than this) and always thought it was a bit of a lost opportunity in that it's so undeveloped for how close to the peninsula it is. I was a bit skeptical of all the fighting against Williams-Colpitt Lake development since I think a lot of this opposition merely causes development to shift around the region, and because there's already a big protected area around Long Lake plus Fleming Park.

It has some problems, mostly in terms of traffic, but they are fixable. And I think a Northwest Arm crossing could be a big asset to the region.

[Dmajackson]

Forgot to include the building will have two commercial units on the ground floor, one level of underground parking and 60 residential units. It's being built by FH Developments Group. They mostly do single-family suburban houses but did recently build a multi-unit in Herring Cove.

Also it is an encroachment permit that was issued. This usually means excavation is going to begin.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by someone123

It has some problems, mostly in terms of traffic, but they are fixable. And I think a Northwest Arm crossing could be a big asset to the region.

Well, considering the NW Arm crossing was proposed 70 years ago and hasn't gained any traction yet, I would not hold my breath that the traffic problems will be fixed.

[DigitalNinja]

Originally Posted by someone123

I used to live in the mainland south area many moons ago (closer in than this) and always thought it was a bit of a lost opportunity in that it's so undeveloped for how close to the peninsula it is. I was a bit skeptical of all the fighting against Williams-Colpitt Lake development since I think a lot of this opposition merely causes development to shift around the region, and because there's already a big protected area around Long Lake plus Fleming Park.

It has some problems, mostly in terms of traffic, but they are fixable. And I think a Northwest Arm crossing could be a big asset to the region.

Honestly, they should protect the park that is already there around Colpitt lake and the trails. They should have a buffer between the trail and a new development and the area around Williams lake should have been allowed to develop on. There is no reason the park needs to be as big as it is. From Williams Lake over to Tamridge Lane is a perfect area for a good mixed use development. Instead the city as per normal will squander the opportunity and attempt to force everyone into over priced apartments.

I like parks, but this is getting to be too much, with this one and then the Blue Mountain park extension there is now too much park land for our population...

[Dmajackson]

I drove by today and site preparation work is definitely underway. Some barriers have been installed along HCR. This project is going to be difficult to get photos of but I'll try my best! Stopping on HCR is dangerous and illegal so photos will have to be taken from the sidewalk which involves parking off of the main street.

[ZacHFX]

Registered an account just to say that at some point, this project was modified to have an increased setback from the sidewalk, but also increased to 10 floors.

New Plan (PDF warning)

[mleblanc]

Originally Posted by ZacHFX

Registered an account just to say that at some point, this project was modified to have an increased setback from the sidewalk, but also increased to 10 floors.

New Plan (PDF warning)

Welcome to the forum; thanks for the update.

[Northend Guy]

Originally Posted by ZacHFX

Registered an account just to say that at some point, this project was modified to have an increased setback from the sidewalk, but also increased to 10 floors.

New Plan (PDF warning)

I wonder if this was done as a proposal at some point and they ended up going with the 7 storey iteration. I am pretty sure what has been approved & gone out for construction is for the 7 storey version. (within the past 2 months or so.)

[Dmajackson]

The construction permit for this project was issued last week and it is for the 7-storey / 60-unit design.

[TheNovaScotian]

Originally Posted by Dmajackson

The construction permit for this project was issued last week and it is for the 7-storey / 60-unit design.

It's odd with so many reports, ringing the alarm bells about the housing crisis and spikes in rents, staff doesn't change course from its ideologically driven plan. As hundreds of units are arbitrarily lopped off developments each year, they just don't see the correlation, yet it's clear and apparent it's part of the reason we're in the mess we're in today.

The poor and lower middle class be damned, here's 26 units that families could have been occupied, and for what? To appease some notion that tall buildings are bad while we shoot ourselves in the foot to trying to prove it?

Please, if anyone has access to reports or studies that have quantifiable proof around some of these concepts please share them. I am trying to understand why this keeps happening as there is no viewplanes or legitimate reasons this was shortened. Having studied planning in school, I never got the answer I was looking for about these matters.

I've found it difficult to find data driven facts around FAR efficacy, it just sort of appeared in New York city planning circles after giant blockbuster developments were reshaping the city skyline. I'm starting to feel that it's just a subjective idea of how one group of people think buildings should look like and the scale chosen is decided by staff without much real data to substantiate the decision.
Other concepts like the complete separation from market economics when making master plans and tall buildings being detrimental to a cityscape are also not very studied but the negative effects of previous planning dogma like sprawl is studied over and over coming to the same conclusions. There is studies of what some people think is an ideal height of a building which they felt was around 10 stories but it's not a data driven analysis.

Beyond traffic patterns and some land use, planning is pretty fast and loose with facts and data when developing policy IMO. So much ideology and dogma that bad ideas become so deeply enshrined that change is slow. Many of the successful areas in most cities are the ones planned long ago and now they just try to mimic those success. Disastrous policies like urban renewal and the suburbs, were the new things and look how bad they failed. Why try new when you can just play it safe and copy what others have done. Cafes and urban greenbelts are all the rage today but what happens when they becomes the big box stores and parkways of past planning schemes?

I'm not advocating against greenbelts or cafes but you have to wonder, what mistakes are we making currently that we will have to fix in the future? Thinking big picture, isn't that what urban planning is all about?

[someone123]

Originally Posted by TheNovaScotian

It's odd with so many reports, ringing the alarm bells about the housing crisis and spikes in rents, staff doesn't change course from its ideologically driven plan. As hundreds of units are arbitrarily lopped off developments each year, they just don't see the correlation, yet it's clear and apparent it's part of the reason we're in the mess we're in today.

Yup.

We are at epic levels of this in Vancouver with people in $3M houses poo-pooing developments while others live in tents. This norm, common in many cities, might be the biggest flaw in governance in Canada right now. It started in the 1970's or so and it got worse and worse as the old zoning filled up and we stopped building new infrastructure. All of the desirable cities have zoning pressure now.

Note that in Halifax planners and council decide what rural fringe land to rezone for development. They have decided, for one reason or another, that many of these parcels shouldn't be developed. Vancouver is hemmed in by mountains and farmland but Halifax is not.

Council also decides if they build new infrastructure or not. So they also often decide what the traffic capacity will be in the future. Halifax's municipal government decided that the Spryfield area should have bad transportation connections and remain underdeveloped.

Any regional development or land shortages in Halifax, and the affordability problems that come from that, are artificial in nature, created by city planning.

[Good Baklava]

While I would also tend to vouch for more density, both overviews of urban containment policies presented above are largely incorrect, overly generalized and quite frankly reactionary.

The notion of urban containment causing housing shortages or price hikes has been repeatedly disproven long ago. Greenbelts aren’t a development-tight bubble, growth is often diverted to villages on the periphery of the municipality, such as those in Milton and Newmarket who commute to the GTA. The real culprit is low-density zoning within containment areas. Halifax has actually been used in a case study of urban containment spanning Canada, the UK and Japan because we represent a lack of agglomeration. This idea of “Right to development” is a very North American thing, as in most developed countries the regulation of development on urban fringes is done at the federal level.

[someone123]

I think you are mixing up normative claims about suburban sprawl with a description of reality.

At the most basic level we have supply and demand. If the supply is limited and demand remains fixed or grows, prices go up. If people can't pay, they don't get housing. To add to the supply of housing, you need to either infill to add more units or you build on a new greenfield site. The city resists greenfield development, rightly or wrongly, and resists urban infill through zoning restrictions. So the price of housing is going up. If people don't want housing to be so expensive the solutions are some combination of greenfield construction and more permissive zoning on the existing urban footprint.

All of this aside I agree there is value in planning and not allowing anything to be built anywhere or allowing the city to sprawl excessively. However I think the footprint of the city will need to grow gradually if its population grows at 2% per year. Alternatively the city could lock in the early 2000's footprint and experience a mixture of lost economic growth and higher housing prices.

[kzt79]

Originally Posted by someone123

I think you are mixing up normative claims about suburban sprawl with a description of reality.

At the most basic level we have supply and demand. If the supply is limited and demand remains fixed or grows, prices go up. If people can't pay, they don't get housing. To add to the supply of housing, you need to either infill to add more units or you build on a new greenfield site. The city resists greenfield development, rightly or wrongly, and resists urban infill through zoning restrictions. So the price of housing is going up.

All of this aside I agree there is value in planning and not allowing anything to be built anywhere or allowing the city to sprawl excessively. However I think the footprint of the city will need to grow gradually if its population grows at 2% per year.

This. I love how the very same people decry the lack of affordable housing then turn around and actively obstruct the solution (increased supply). What they fail to grasp is that in the long term, the issue will resolve itself one way or another - the other being that Halifax becomes a less desirable place to live, decreasing demand.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by kzt79

This. I love how the very same people decry the lack of affordable housing then turn around and actively obstruct the solution (increased supply). What they fail to grasp is that in the long term, the issue will resolve itself one way or another - the other being that Halifax becomes a less desirable place to live, decreasing demand.

I think part of what happened in Halifax was it had plentiful infill opportunities for many years due to past sprawl and low growth. Councillors treated suburban and urban development in a very leisurely manner, arbitrarily killing projects they didn't like and taking forever to make decisions. Now the city is growing at more like 2% a year compounded instead of 1%. The creation of zoned development space is not keeping up with the city's growth. If this continues there will be some mix of lowered living standards and lowered economic growth that is worse than what might have otherwise been possible.

The trade-off is really awful for the city. Most of the time these lopped off floors and approval delays don't produce any discernible gain, but it matters greatly to a working class family if their rent is $1,200 a month or $1,100 a month. It is a "let them eat cake" type of scenario where one group is making decisions based on minor preferences while the stakes are higher for another group that has little to no voice.

[Good Baklava]

That’s roughly the point, it’s that infill development can’t keep keep up with demand. Preventing all outward growth is next to impossible, but the effect of greenbelts alone on outward growth isn’t one of restriction; it’s merely diverting the current.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Good Baklava

That’s roughly the point, it’s that infill development can’t keep keep up with demand. Preventing all outward growth is next to impossible, but the effect of greenbelts alone on outward growth isn’t one of restriction; it’s merely diverting the current.

It would move development to a slightly worse place than what otherwise would have been built from the perspective of the people buying the developments (with the ideals not necessarily being known to planners ahead of time; a lot of this growth is incremental with residents and businesses deciding where to locate and building developments that suit them).

I don't have a problem with setting land aside per se but we should ask what the goal is. For example around here we have a tiny sliver of agricultural land in BC and there's a desire to keep it from being redeveloped into suburban sprawl.

The benefits of setting aside portions of the urban fringe around Halifax are less clear. Often they seem driven by NIMBYism, people who would rather parkland nearby instead of more suburbs. I understand the desire for this but I don't think it's a net win at a regional development level. I am open to the idea but a little skeptical of the idea that there are unique slivers of ecologically sensitive land that happen to be right next to Halifax but aren't also common in say Lunenburg or Guysborough counties which look almost the same and where there is much less demand for development.

If we're just looking at land used per new unit of housing developed then setting aside specific land does not really matter. Instead of creating specific greenbelts you could have per-development requirements. This is already common and avoids a bunch of land ownership issues.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by TheNovaScotian

Please, if anyone has access to reports or studies that have quantifiable proof around some of these concepts please share them. I am trying to understand why this keeps happening as there is no viewplanes or legitimate reasons this was shortened. Having studied planning in school, I never got the answer I was looking for about these matters.

I've found it difficult to find data driven facts around FAR efficacy, it just sort of appeared in New York city planning circles after giant blockbuster developments were reshaping the city skyline. I'm starting to feel that it's just a subjective idea of how one group of people think buildings should look like and the scale chosen is decided by staff without much real data to substantiate the decision.
Other concepts like the complete separation from market economics when making master plans and tall buildings being detrimental to a cityscape are also not very studied but the negative effects of previous planning dogma like sprawl is studied over and over coming to the same conclusions. There is studies of what some people think is an ideal height of a building which they felt was around 10 stories but it's not a data driven analysis.

Beyond traffic patterns and some land use, planning is pretty fast and loose with facts and data when developing policy IMO. So much ideology and dogma that bad ideas become so deeply enshrined that change is slow. Many of the successful areas in most cities are the ones planned long ago and now they just try to mimic those success. Disastrous policies like urban renewal and the suburbs, were the new things and look how bad they failed. Why try new when you can just play it safe and copy what others have done. Cafes and urban greenbelts are all the rage today but what happens when they becomes the big box stores and parkways of past planning schemes?

I'm not advocating against greenbelts or cafes but you have to wonder, what mistakes are we making currently that we will have to fix in the future? Thinking big picture, isn't that what urban planning is all about?

An excellent summation of the planning profession and its weaknesses in one post. Well done.