Quote:
Originally Posted by ILoveHalifax
So based on the evidence posted by Fenwick, Halifax will have no problem sustaining itself with a population of 300,001 or 450,000 or 650,000 or 750,000 and so on. The world will not end with a building 50 stories tall and a street widened to 6 lanes. YEAH for population growth.
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Well, Fenwick's data are more about global issues, and have little to do with local climates / weather (which are not the same thing) and populations, but certainly Halifax's geography could sustain a population many times greater than it has. There are a wide variety of much bigger cities with similar geographies already and they are doing fine, for the most part.
I think Halifax could nearly double right now without even having to increase sprawl / most infrastructure much - such is the extent of space available that could be infilled increasing density in areas that are already developed. (I'm saying that off the top off my head - I'm sure it could easily be challenged.)
It would have implications for more rural parts of Nova Scotia, too, in terms of pressure for agricultural production, etc., and would likely contribute to them having more sustainable economies, etc. There would be some negatives too in the form of likely deforestation and pollution, etc. but much of that can be managed / mitigated to some extent. And of course, there are swaths of the population that, economies aside, are strongly opposed to anything that would change the "character" of our city and province.
A bigger "Halifax" at the centre of the HRM / province could be a good thing in many ways. The questions are what is realistic to aim for and expect, what socio-economic-political forces would actually bring all the new population here (offshore oil boom? better marketing? better incentives / business climate for entrepreneurial immigrants to stay? etc.) The employment issue is a bit of chicken-and-egg - what comes first? Jobs or people? A bigger population means more service needs, thus more jobs, but how do you kickstart getting more people here in the first place, when the prime motivator is likely to be jobs, which - true or not - people perceive as not existing in Halifax?
This is the challenge of the population growth goals. Not a challenge that can't be overcome, but a challenge nonetheless.
As for 50 story skyscrapers, I think we'll get there - not right away, but when the population / market / economy / land value has increased to some level when developers decide there is real value in building them. And of course, when the political will has developed to allow them. I'd wager it will be a good 25 or 35 years before that happens, and only if the population does increase to 7 or 800,000 or so, which is probably a stretch based on current growth... But things happen when their time comes, and it's hard to say when that time will be. Imagine if someone told us in 2006 (remembering how dead the development environment was at that time) that there would be numerous high-rise developments happening all at once all over the city in 2016 - even in the precious downtown! and several entire new neighbourhoods full of fairly dense mid-to-highrise developments springing up in what was then still forest. We likely would have raised an eyebrow at such a prediction. Amazing things are happening.
Widening streets is a whole other debate. Clearly, there are some corridors that should be widened based on current usage because they are essentially major highways masked as 2 or 3 lane streets (Bedford Highway, for example.) But its controversial and unclear to say the least as to whether widening one street here and there does much of anything to mitigate traffic issues on the whole. There's always a bottleneck somewhere down the road. And who knows if in 30 years private single-occupant vehicles will still be the preference of the majority. Probably - but very hard to predict. There may be some other way....and of course there may not.
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