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Originally Posted by someone123
Granville Mall is in great shape? It didn't really look like that when I was back in August.
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Oh, I just meant that physically the structures are in good shape (i.e., old doesn't mean rundown). I know there's some trouble with the business model around there.
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Heritage buildings can't satisfy the TD, RBC, or IBM type tenants who want on the order of 100,000 square feet of space... larger modern developments can bring in a lot more population than the old buildings can or could sustain. Many NIMBY/STV types don't seem to get this at all, or if they do they don't acknowledge it.
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That's true, and I'm definitely not in league with the STV camp. (I'm excited for Nova Centre, for example.) But Halifax has a high vacancy rate for class A office space, and building a giant office tower is not really the savviest business decision right now. We need the kind of start-up and small business incubation a city of our size can really excel at, leveraging the city's reputation for quality of life, and the university population. That's what'll keep people here post-grad, and that's what attracts the bigger companies--not big office developments and tax incentives, which rarely work anyway. Halifax is simply not going to become a big, muscular player on the international or even national business scene, not in the short term. Our goal shouldn't be to compete with Calgary and Toronto or whoever--we're in the league of Portland, OR, or Boulder, CO.
I think the idea of "modern" demands vs., I guess, "historic" demands is a bit fallacious. Cities today need basically the same things cities of the past did: walkable neighbourhoods, a mix of building types, large spaces and small spaces, old and new. So as older buildings become less attractive for large companies, we still need to keep them around--they'rel small-business incubators, breeding the next round of innovation.
Anyway, I kind of lost the thread from the Cogswell discussion. Basically, we can afford to lose the parking garages, which, really, aren't built for "modern" purposes, anyway, but for mid 20th-century purposes.