Halifax will soon decide how to create affordable housing in Cogswell District

As the Cogswell District project progresses, Halifax will soon have to decide how it will approach affordable housing in the development.

"There's a whole bunch of different ways that affordable housing can be considered in Cogswell and some are already underway," Coun. Waye Mason said in a recent interview.

The Cogswell District project aims to create a new 6.5-hectare neighbourhood where a maze of traffic ramps has stood for decades. It's designed to connect downtown with the city's north end and waterfront. The redevelopment will add an estimated 2,500 residents to the area and affordable housing has been discussed as part of that mix since it was approved in 2019.

Mason, who represents downtown on Halifax regional council, said plans for a lot inside the Cogswell District, at the corner of Cornwallis and Barrington streets, could offer a piece of the answer. The municipality is looking at the possibility of using the location for a new facility for the Metro Turning Point shelter, including a six-storey building with housing and services and support for people who are homeless.

"That whole section along there is already being talked about and that would be a substantial change and increase in supply for affordable housing and for services for the most vulnerable," Mason said.

In May, councillors directed staff to start consulting with the public and developers about what they want to see in inclusionary zoning, defined as zoning that requires affordable units to be part of in new residential buildings.

"Are we going to require inclusionary zoning and require each of those properties to have one in 30 or one in 20 units be affordable to some degree? That's still being discussed and worked on," Mason said.

Right now, Halifax uses density bonusing in the urban core, a system in which developers behind large projects pay cash to the municipality that is used to build affordable housing elsewhere.

Cogswell redevelopment project manager Donna Davis said her team will begin planning public consultations about the new neighbourhood within the next six months.

"We would like to see it start sooner rather than later," she said.

Right now the city is creating roads, sidewalks, parks and other features of the district where the Cogswell Interchange used to be. Once that is complete, five blocks of land could be made available to the private sector for housing, Davis said. 

"I'm not expecting that we're going to dispose of all of those parcels of land all at the same time. I expect that that's going to be a 10-year process."

Davis said the planning and development department will research different options for creating affordable housing after consulting with Haligonians and present those to the city within the next year.

Nova Scotia ACORN chair Hannah Wood said she wants to see the whole area dedicated to affordable housing, given the city's dire needs. ACORN represents the interests of people with low and moderate incomes.

"We have thousands of people on the wait list for public housing and we have hundreds of people sleeping on the streets," Wood said. 

"I think the Poplar Park that they're creating … will just be full of tents, full of people sleeping in it, by the time it's been built a month."

Woods said affordable rents "should be 30 per cent of the tenant's income" and "not tied to the market in any way."

But Woods said she's skeptical about whether the city is seriously committed to affordable housing in the area because public consultation is coming late in the planning timeline.

Davis said the city needed to wait for the land to be prepared before coming up with details.

"We do have time," Davis said. "We need this direction from council and I expect that we'll have that within the next year."

Mason said any aggressive plan would require buy-in from the provincial government and even the federal government, considering the need for density.

"It's important to have the province at the table because they have the deep pockets, they have the debt capacity and they have all of the staff and all the resources that run all of the existing housing…. We need to convince them to come in."

The city estimates it will cost $122.6 million to complete the new district. 

Ten years ago, when the district was designed, Mason said city leaders thought it would pay for itself from land sales.

"It's some of the most expensive land that we've created in Halifax ever. Those 6.5 acres are going to cost $120 million to create. And you know, if we turn that all into affordable housing or even a substantial chunk of it, then that's money that isn't being recovered from the sale," he said.

Earlier communities displaced 

Concordia University urban planning professor Ted Rutland has studied and written about Halifax's development.

He said there's a historical obligation for affordable housing, given how the construction of Cogswell Interchange came about. It was created in conjunction with the development of Scotia Square, he said, and together the projects uprooted hundreds, if not thousands, of poor and Black people when their houses were torn down.

"Providing housing for the kinds of people who were displaced should be a real priority in this project, and it doesn't seem to be," Rutland said.

"We're talking about housing people who are really vulnerable, including poor and working-class people. In an increasingly expensive city, we need to be building social housing."