Halifax saw little city-centre development during the 1990s and early 2000s. Although the region’s population grew during this period, residential and commercial development took place for the most part at the urban periphery in areas such as Clayton Park West, Dartmouth Crossing, and Morris Lake. While car-oriented development in suburban areas carried on unabated, infill development in the urban core was discouraged by an extremely lengthy, cumbersome development approval process.
As the city stagnated, a consensus emerged that policy governing the development of the downtown area – including a 35-year-old land-use by-law and 60-year-old planning strategy – required updating and reform. This initiative, called HRMbyDesign, streamlined the development process and encouraged particular architectural and urban design strategies with an aim to improve the downtown area’s walkability and vibrancy. As a result of this exercise, new downtown planning documents were adopted in 2009.
The above reforms have, over the past decade, contributed to a development boom in downtown Halifax. This is illustrated by the below graph that shows the approximate area of land in downtown Halifax occupied by ground-level parking lots (a common use for vacant land) between 2005 and 2022.
The parking lots were manually traced from aerial photo imagery in Google Earth and measured using QGIS. In 2005, many of the largest parking lots were concentrated on Halifax’s post-industrial waterfront, or flanked the Spring Garden Road shopping district as a result of 1950s-era urban renewal. Parking lot land area increased slightly in 2010 as a result of the demolition of the old Halifax Infirmary on Queen Street, the Trinity Anglican Church at the corner of Cogswell and Brunswick, and the Bank of Canada building. These sites all became surface parking lots by the end of the decade.
By 2015, new development had begun to consume some of the city-centre vacant lots. This included the Halifax Central Library, the first of the three Clyde Street “Sister Sites” sold by the city to private developers, and the mixed-use Nova Centre which houses the Halifax Convention Centre. The redevelopment of the Citadel Inn on Brunswick Street also eliminated a large, street-facing parking lot.
By 2022, the total area of parking lots had declined to 12.4 ha, a 31.5 per cent decrease compared to 2010. Major developments within the past few years include another large mixed-use development on Clyde Street, ongoing residential construction on the former Trinity Church site, expansion of Dalhousie’s Sexton Campus, and the Queen’s Marque development on the Halifax waterfront.
The gradual decline in the substantial area of land dedicated to car storage in the centre of Atlantic Canada’s most populous city reflects a downtown development boom that can be attributed in part to the HRMbyDesign initiative. A similar measure of downtown’s renaissance is the substantial increase in population between the 2016 and 2021 censuses.
