Quote:
Originally Posted by Hali87
There's a sense that people are sort of entitled to stay in their villages, and this goes unquestioned. Port Hawkesbury for example is a dying town with very little economic reason to exist, but it's home to people, has a long history etc., and the provincial government is absolutely unwilling to let it disappear from the map even if its continued existence makes no economic sense. Some people also don't want to live in a city. Whether or not taxpayers should be subsidizing this lifestyle is another question. It's ultimately more of an emotional issue than a rational one, but people are emotional and not necessarily rational.
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People don't
have to live in the 'city'; the suburbs will always be there, if people still want to live in a small-town context.
This government assistance to the emotional villagers is a form of municipal welfare and it harms the entire province because we are never going to a see a return on any of these subsidies.
History is meaningless if there is no future. How would Port Hawkesbury have it? -- allow Nova Scotia to devolve into the sad state of Cape Breton? Ultimately this is only bleeding Halifax unnecessarily when we could be more beneficially using our tax revenue for ALL Nova Scotians by permitting our towns and cities, which actually have profitable industries, to urbanise their developments and more quickly build upon those profitable industries instead of sprawling ourselves into debt.
I can imagine places like Yarmouth, Truro, Amherst, New Glasgow, and even Sydney experiencing a turnaround if allowed to densify. This would be further aided if the province would amalgamate the satellite communities to these towns in order to provide more of an economic lever for these towns to focus development and actually establish urban cores that can provide a return of tax revenue. And who knows, maybe some of these towns would prosper into small cities. It would be thrilling if Nova Scotia had more cities!!
Despite Halifax's history, if it made more business sense to invest in and grow Sydney, instead -- then so be it. Halifax would have to go bye-bye.
I guess that means the citadel views would be saved.