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Originally Posted by Colin May
Does anyone believe SMU when they trot out PR lady Margaret Murphy to tell a TV reporter that saving the building would cost millions ?
That wooden staircase looked like a very nice piece of work.
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I think we are effectively asking SMU, a self-interested entity, to make decisions for the good of the overall neighbourhood or city. This reliance on the goodwill of property owners is doomed to fail, and the request is not necessarily even fair to them to begin with.
On top of this we have the PR and information asymmetry aspect, with SMU claiming that this would have cost $10M to preserve. This seems implausible, but I think the battle's already lost when it gets to the point where we accept that a heritage building of exceptional public value (whether or not this designation applies to this building is a matter of debate; yet another problem) can be torn down if the owner arbitrarily decides that it is too expensive to maintain, or more expensive than some alternative. This is particularly ridiculous since the owners often decide to defer maintenance on these buildings for decades before finally deciding that they would cost too much to fix.
The Dennis Building story is pretty similar. Somehow it's been framed in terms of it being more or less OK to tear down the building as long as some engineering firm says that the same square footage can be obtained more cheaply somewhere else. That calculation has nothing to do with the reason why the public would want to keep the Dennis Building around.
The #1 heritage issue in NS is that the legislation needs to be fixed so that heritage buildings are designated based on their value to the public and, once they're designated, are properly maintained so that they last as long as possible. It's not a big surprise that this hasn't happened given the fact that the biggest preoccupation of the province's primary heritage advocacy group has nothing to do with preserving heritage buildings.