Planning to Fail: How Halifax is Digging a Deeper Housing Hole

When efficiency comes at the price of sanity, it's time to simplify. Local lumber, local labor, and a blueprint from the past can save the future of our homes.

This is INSANE.

It's not the price of 2x4s—it's the cost of complexity that's killing us.

We need to SIMPLIFY building codes and planning rules.

How, at this crisis moment can City Hall be coming out all po-faced and pitching and saying we should complexify building and planning codes further, and knowingly increase the time and costs of construction?

People want to live in houses, not tower blocks or emergency pallet sheds.

This should be the least controversial statement you'll read in this post today, not the most fraught.

We're 70,000 homes behind in Nova Scotia.

We've never built 7,000 in a year and demand is increasing. So we're staring down more than ten years of housing pain. Minimum.

Look, all the energy efficiency, net zero, futurama of home building blah blah blah ideas that the hucksters and hard sellers, architects, engineers, and activists are dreaming up are laudable goals... IF people had places to live at a reasonable price. If our economy had a strong foundation built under it. If regular working people could afford new homes.

The government loves to make words mean their opposite. There’s nothing less sustainable than this sustainability plan.

What is being proposed now not only takes longer and costs more, with no incremental efficiency payoff for years on brutalist buildings that won’t last 30. What’s on offer is Soviet-style mass housing that serves only to desecrate the landscape, people’s aspirations, and any hope for the future the rising generation might still hold.

I’m positive that of the 5,000 plus people working for the city, almost all are good and decent people who love their friends, their homes, and their families, and they want the best for our community. But organizational cultures take on a life of their own sometimes with pathological corporatized mental defects and illnesses that must be diagnosed and treated. They can become dangerous. Everything City Hall’s culture is producing in the world of City Planning is relentlessly wrong and hideous. The departmental life form is a rebellious, petulant, child. A theatre of radical emotion producing - by design and decree - unremitant, incessant, ugliness, expense, and waste.

The repayment time on these insane energy efficiency schemes is growing to 40 to 120 years. None of this tech is going to last that long. None of these governments will last that many months. Only the bureaucracy will live on forever if it’s not brought into check.

It all started with the tyranny of ZONING. The first and biggest mistake in modern city planning. Everything is segregated - homes here, shops there, schools way over there, workplaces long commutes away - creating vast wastelands and pockets of helplessness connected only by long soulless highways that divide the last of the wilderness, all of which mechanically crushes any prospect of community or municipal dignity.

It’s now impossible to overestimate the amount of cost and despair City Hall and Planning are generating with their ugly ideology.

A group of Toronto developers recently revealed how their costs have changed over the years. We all have a sense of this.

This isn’t about historic preservation societies, themselves now a lost cause artifact of the past. We’re not at war with modernity. We need to rail against the post-modernist social engineering gone mad at City Hall. We must never be beaten into accepting ugliness and disarray as a form of beauty.

The human experiments of the avant-garde elite bureaucracy have pushed the aesthetic boundaries of societal norms too far and too fast. They’ve outrun their own headlights. The absurd details of their ideology that they now push ahead of every other practical human concern in the city are grim atrocities that are traumatizing the poorest and most vulnerable among us.

We’ve got to defund City Planning and create a new plan for new towns and government.

The only truly efficient and economical solution to the housing crisis is building simply, building locally, and building to last. Exactly as we did in the most coveted and valuable homes in our city today which are mostly approaching 80-100 years old, but are more valuable than ever and more valuable than new construction.

We have to get back to basics. For our families. For the rising generation. For communities. And for the economy.

I’m mad. But I’m not the radical activist weirdo here. I’m not outside the mainstream of thought.

Here’s Federal Housing Minister, and the next Prime Minister from Nova Scotia, Sean Fraser articulating a vision that has worked in our recent past and around the world for thousands of years:

Something has to give. It's not about the price of 2x4's, or labour availability. What has to give is the utopia of rules being piled up in the silo of city planning where power-mongering petty potentates driven by fear for their kingdom are making things worse by the day.

When the bureaucratic avant-guard became the establishment it also became tyrannical and totalitarian, mixing our own fears, insecurities, and knowledge gaps with their elitest, out-of-touch towers to create a big box, one-size-fits-all, mass-production state of mind where no technocrat, however emboldened and overflowing with jargon, can ever be named or held responsible for their bleak, concrete, utilitarian worldview.

There's NO reason home building should be this complicated, take this long, cost this much, or look this awful. As The Globe and Mail recently reported from Toronto City Hall,

“Toronto needs to work harder, and smarter, at being more beautiful.

The first step is to admit the public sector has a problem. Toronto has seemingly strived to meet the height of mediocrity when it comes to design…”

Having a decent plan to build new beautiful transit hub-oriented walkable villages is just not that hard… and it costs nothing if we strip away the bureaucratic cancer that's metastasized in our city. We’ll save money.

The net-nothing idea that City Hall has just come out of left field with is the LAST thing we should be doing. I mean that literally. It is the last thing we should do after we get back to basics and get this growing existential crisis solved.

In fact, we should be rolling the building codes and planning rules back 100 years… to when we created The Hydrostone Community, the Allen Duncan Lawrence Area, the West End, The Old Downtown and Crichton Park in Dartmouth, and the Jubilee Road area. The most valuable and desired neighbourhoods we have.

In fact, we should be rolling the building codes and planning rules back 100 years to the time between the wars when a decent crew (5-10) with a couple of experienced builders and new apprentices with their heads in the game could build a nice small home - think of the homes on Allen, Duncan, or Lawrence, or any of the homes in the North End) with modern tools in 2-4 months... with local lumber, local craft, and local labour. Easily keeping the cost of construction under $400k for homes - once called "starter homes" that are now selling at $700k because of this messed up market caused... by more than any other factor... by this insane sci-fi solutioneering at City Hall.

The fact is we’ve done this before. Lots of times. After the wars. After the Halifax explosion. And it’s been done all over the world. It just hasn’t been done to solve an unforced field error of bureaucracy run amok. That’s the only novel part that must be solved.

The New Town Movement

In one way, the planned city has always been a part of civilization. Records exist of plans for new towns back as far as the ancient Egyptians. Most of the “planned towns” in history were based on providing for military, trade, or harbor needs. The idea of planning a city for the needs of the people who would live there didn’t crystallize until the end of the 19th century when Sir Ebenezer Howard, an Englishman, first suggested a series of “garden cities” north of London.

However, it was another 50 years, at the end of World War II, when these garden cities really began to flourish. The world was moving into a new era of rapid urbanization. The problems of pollution, traffic congestion, and the impersonalized isolation of urban sprawl were growing. The concept of creating new towns spread across Europe with the creation of planned communities to deal with these problems.

These “new towns” sought to plan in advance the design and growth of cities. Some of the key features were:

• Pedestrian-friendly walkways completely separated from vehicle traffic to promote the safe movement of people between neighborhoods, schools, and shopping.

• Architecturally innovative housing,

• Community-owned land to create activity areas and a sense of openness,

• Community works of art,

• Close proximity of commercial and industrial parks for people to live close to where they work,

and

• A development philosophy to respect the land.

Our great advantage is that our NEW TOWNS don’t need to be built from scratch. They can be rescued from natural communities left to rot by the Amalgamation of Nova Scotia’s wealth in the radical big box urban and up effort by Halifax City Hall.

Dozens of natural communities, some estimate 200, have been starved of natural wealth and self-government for almost 30 years. They can be set free to imagine and build the future that Amalgamation denied them.

It seems ridiculous that this simple plan is not a foundation of liberal, centrist, or left-leaning government in Canada. If the Liberals, and Liberal Party operatives within the Municipal government don’t change direction immediately, we’ll be in a place within 18 months where this is a signature, election landslide-winning, right-of-centre, Conservative idea.

We've got to get the other levels of government to step up and step in to shut down this mess that has gotten totally out of control under the weakest weak mayor government in our history.

The buildings we leave behind represent our contribution to the human history of our community. Nothing more directly impacts our quality of life and the environment that surrounds us. Nothing gives more lift to the rising generation or is more of a burden on them. The bureaucracy has buried our city under atomic atrocities of post-modernist radical schemes, not to build homes we can live in, but to wage an ideological war against colonialism and tradition.

Our ability to define our future and who we are as a city depends on us taking back our city from the Planning Department and getting back to a well-understood, localist, human, and practical plan for everyone to live happily and peacefully in a prosperous place.

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