Halifax's Empty Cradle
High rises and low hopes: Planning without people, purpose, or future. Halifax Isn’t Working for Families—And That Means It Isn’t Working at All.
“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
A city designed for density but devoid of life. A street so optimized for movement that nobody stops. A place so overplanned it forgot to be pleasant. A downtown so crammed with towers it’s become hollow.
The tragedy isn’t just that they’re full.
It’s that they’re full of nothing.
Halifax: We Made the Map…
Just Not the One We Meant To
Remember a decade ago when the big dream was for Halifax to become “world class”?
Well, congratulations are in order. According to TomTom’s annual traffic index, we’ve arrived—on the list of North America’s most congested and slowest-moving cities.
This didn’t happen by accident. It’s the natural consequence of a city hall captured by developers with no skin in the game beyond quarterly returns. It’s the reward for a planning department that applies 1970s solutions to 1950s problems while fantasizing about a downtown commuter culture future that’s never coming. It’s the cost of confusing density with livability, symbols for the thing symbolized, and “urban and up” ideology with vision.
But here’s the truth: no one set out to wreck Halifax. They just stopped asking, What kind of city are we really building—and who is it for?
Halifax Isn’t Working for Families—And That Means It Isn’t Working at All
Because it isn’t working for families. And if it isn’t working for families, it isn't working for the future, no matter how many immigrants, students, bureaucrats, and towers there are. And it isn’t working for anyone who just wants to cross a street safely or get home on time to make dinner, raise a kid, or breathe something other than exhaust and dope smoke.
Check out your city today on the Tom Tom Congestion and traffic jam maps:
Still, there’s a way forward.
We can reclaim this city—not with more consultants or vanity projects, but with a new civic seriousness rooted in care, responsibility, and common sense. Start with this: if we want to build a great city, we need to make it work for households again.
Not just units. Not just density. Not just GDP.
Families. Neighborhoods. Streets worth walking. Lives worth staying for.
We need to talk about the city we dream of — the kind that we all skrimp and save to go and walk through and call it a "holiday". We shouldn't need a holiday from our own city.
We know bigger is not always better. There are limits to everything. And we need to talk about the geopolitical limits of what is possible in Halifax that can still be nice.
There is a future worth imagining. And it doesn't have to cost more. It can cost less. We can live and breathe happier with less "world class" to create space for the things really matter to the rising generation.
I've only lived in Halifax for 50 years, but I can attest to everything you've described, and I was able immediately to identify the location of the photograph accompanying your post (and I've experienced the same feelings whenever I am near to it).
Part of the story you tell takes me back to the much heralded (at the time) "Ivany Report" of 2014. Very much like the work of Richard Florida, it was, in my view, a blueprint for a childless paradise on the Peninsula. We have been building an urban "empty cradle" to serve the growing number of citizens, who for ideological, cultural or fiscal reasons, perceive any family with more children than replacement size as oddities at best.
Big mistake: building that new huge convention centre.