Halifax considers incentives for developers who convert old offices to apartments

In an effort to respond to its ongoing housing crunch, the city of Halifax is considering ways of encouraging developers to convert old offices into new apartments. 

Since reaching an agreement last fall to get money from the federal Housing Accelerator Fund, Halifax has begun to develop a pilot program that will use some of that money for grants to convert some downtown office buildings into housing. 

"We don't have an office crisis; we have a housing crisis," said Coun. Waye Mason in an interview Friday. "It seems like a smart thing to do to convert empty office spaces into residential that will be full as soon as it's done."

Mason said staff are still working out details, but he thought the grant program would take up "a couple of million" of the $79 million in federal housing money, and this would be enough to fund "two or three" pilot conversions. 

At least three buildings have been suggested as possible candidates for the pilot program: the former Centennial building on Hollis Street, the former RBC building on George Street, and the former BMO building on George Street. 

Mason said the advantage to the city is that such projects could provide housing quickly, have a low impact on the streetscape, and be more environmentally friendly than tearing down old buildings and sending the waste to landfill. 

The units would be priced at market rates. 

"We would of course love to see far more federal and provincial investment in affordable housing; we need thousands of  affordable housing units," Mason said. "But we also need to see these conversions and because it can be so expensive to convert commercial, that might not be the right place to put the affordable housing."

Mason said a grant program could be required for "rapid change" in the downtown.

"If we want to see these buildings get turned into units that are occupied quickly, I think it's okay to incentivize that," he said. 

A recent report from the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) — a Toronto-based organization dedicated to knowledge on city-building — called Halifax a "capital of conversions." 

"Halifax really punches above its weight in terms of the amount of space that has been converted to housing," said Jennifer Barrett, the managing director of the CUI.

She attributes this to a growing demand for housing, a declining demand for offices, a lack of vacant land, policy changes to development requirements, and the city's "small scale" developers. 

Several conversions are underway in Halifax, including those from Sidewalk Real Estate, a company whose announced projects include a former hotel on King Street in Dartmouth, the Centennial office building on Hollis Street, and the RBC building on Dartmouth's Portland Street.