Calls mount for vacant Halifax buildings to be turned into housing
CBC
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.
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."
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.