Calls mount for vacant Halifax buildings to be turned into housing

As the number of homeless people rises, there are mounting calls for empty buildings around Halifax to be repurposed for affordable housing.

The Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia added its voice this week, with a statement calling Halifax Regional Municipality "negligent" for leaving the old Halifax Memorial Library on Spring Garden Road empty for nearly a decade.

Sandra Barss, president of the trust, said housing is outside the group's mandate, but members felt compelled to weigh in given the severity of the housing crisis.

"We have this burgeoning population of people who are living rough, as they call it," Barss said.

"They're homeless, they're living in tents, and it's now the end of November and it's not a very nice place to be living in a tent outside at the end of November. This might be an option."

A spokesperson for HRM said staff are currently working on a recommendation for the future of the site, which will be put to municipal councillors for a vote. They did not provide any details about the recommendation or say when it would be presented.

'Not going to work'

Halifax Mayor Mike Savage was blunt in his appraisal of the Heritage Trust's idea.

"It would be nice but it's not going to work," he said. "People need solutions right now, they can't wait years. The old library is tens of millions of dollars to make it livable."

Architect Susan Fitzgerald said adapting old buildings can be expensive, but knocking them down and starting fresh comes with other costs.

"We're not only in a housing crisis, we've also got a climate crisis and there's a lot of embodied carbon within an existing building," Fitzgerald told CBC's Mainstreet Nova Scotia earlier this month.

"So if you can, if it's possible to reuse a building, it's imperative to try and do that."

Other groups calling for adaptive reuse

Fitzgerald is part of a group called Architects Against Housing Alienation, which, like the Heritage Trust, thinks idle properties should be made available for affordable housing.

The group recently created hypothetical plans for a community with affordable housing centred around the Gray Arena in Dartmouth.

Like the old library, the city is undecided on what to do with the old arena. Unlike the old library, the old arena has been used intermittently in recent years, including as a winter shelter two years ago. 

The design project was created for an international architecture exhibition, but also to demonstrate the potential of vacant and underused buildings in Nova Scotia. 

An untold number of other Nova Scotians are also looking at empty buildings as potential housing.

For the past two years, people have been dropping virtual pins on a provincial map to create a crowdsourced database called This Should Be Housing. Each pin represents an empty building or piece of land that the contributor thinks should be housing. 

Most of the pins are in Halifax. Some of the properties are publicly owned and some are owned privately.

Sale of public buildings 'serious mistake'

In addition to the old library, The Heritage Trust is also calling for the former Bloomfield School and the former St. Pat's-Alexandra School, both in Halifax's north end, to be converted into affordable housing. The trust said HRM made a "serious mistake" in selling those buildings to developers after they were deemed surplus to the city's needs.

The two separate owners of the former schools have each said they plan to include housing in their redevelopment projects, but detailed plans have not been released publicly and the projects have stalled. 

In the case of the old Bloomfield School, the building has fallen into such disrepair that Halifax Fire and Emergency deemed it an immediate safety risk, following a recent inspection. 

BANC Investments Ltd. bought the Bloomfield property in 2021, but earlier this year, owner Alex Halef said high interest rates mean he can't afford to demolish the old building. In the meantime, he and the city struck a deal for addressing the safety concerns, the details of which are being kept secret.

The sale of St. Pat's-Alexandra to Jono Developments Ltd. closed in 2020, but the company has done nothing with the site since then. 

Each sale was conditional on breaking ground within five years of closing, at which time HRM would have the right to buy back the properties.