Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith P.
As for MacKinnon's comments, they are not against the proposal as much as they are a defense of HRMbD, which he was an early supporter of despite its flawed premise. HRMbD was a "better than nothing" policy, but it is already out of date thanks to the boom in Halifax and should not be slavishly followed. That is hard for planning geeks to accept, but it is reality.
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To be honest I also thought it was a pretty poorly-argued piece that is inconsistent with a lot of other things the HDBC has said in the past.
Fundamentally the reasons why there was little office construction downtown for a long time are:
1) The office market was overbuilt in the 80's and there was a recession in the 90's. Very few office towers were built anywhere in Canada during the 1990's and even early in the last decade.
2) The downtown is not very competitive with the suburbs because of slower development times and higher costs.
Reason (2) is not going to be helped by adding red tape, and regardless of what happens with Skye developers can still go for the quicker HbD process.
Even more fundamentally, the whole argument that developers are responsible for the empty lots downtown because they were holding out to cash in is really shaky. Governments own or are responsible for most of the empty lots. The waterfront is all public. Nova Centre is a public project. Barrington and George is public. The Clyde Street and former infirmary area is all publicly-owned. For the other sites, we have seen a pretty constant stream of proposals.