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A couple of years back, Peggy Cameron decided to put her master’s degree in environmental studies to work to examine the adverse effects of Halifax’s demolition and construction activity on the climate crisis and greenhouse gas emissions.
Cameron concluded that the propensity to demolish existing single-dwelling and smaller buildings to facilitate the construction of multiple highrises is bad for both the environment and the citizens who can’t afford appropriate housing.
“When you build smaller-scale buildings, you can choose building materials and a design that can be carbon negative,” said Cameron, co-founder of the groups Friends of Halifax Common and Development Options Halifax.
“You can repurpose existing buildings, add on. It’s actually cheaper and quicker to build and it’s less costly to the environment and to affordability and to the general socio-economic character of a neighbourhood.”
One focus of Cameron’s 62-page report is the Carlton Street block of Halifax, a centrally located, small-scale, mixed-use area of the city near Camp Hill Cemetery and the Public Gardens.
Buildings For the Climate Crisis – A Halifax Case Study says approximately 20 to 25 multi-unit historic buildings on the block are 100-plus years old and 15 houses on two sides of Carlton Street have individual and collective heritage designation.
This graphic, produced by Development Options Halifax, shows the number of demolition permits issued on the Halifax peninsula from 2020 to September of this year.
Initial public consultations as part of Halifax Regional Municipality’s Centre Plan process proposed adding 400 residents to the area with three buildings, five and 10 storeys in height.
Subsequent proposals called for four towers of up to 30-storeys in height, multiple floors of underground parking, the demolition of several multi-unit buildings and the relocation and renovation of two historic buildings.
Cameron’s report found the total preliminary embodied carbon emissions from two separate Carlton block development proposals are modestly estimated to be in the order of 31,000 metric tonnes of carbon equivalent.
The 31,000 metric tonnes of carbon is equivalent to about 40 years of operational carbon from the existing buildings, or to the carbon emissions from 9,497 passenger vehicles, to consuming more than 13 million litres of gasoline or 70,000 barrels of oil, or to the emissions generated by heating 7,260 homes for an entire year.
“Taller buildings typically require more structural and foundation materials such as iron, steel, aluminum or cement products to ensure their safety and performance,” the report found. “As the building height increases, the embodied carbon emission intensity increases. Additionally, taller buildings commonly have more underground parking, which requires a large amount of concrete use and associated carbon.”
The report cited several studies that compared embodied energy and operating energy from the reuse of an existing building, remodeling a building and replacing a building. Three scenarios found that “reusing an existing building to make it more energy efficient had an immediate savings of total energy use.”
“If building new, no net savings of total energy are achieved until a future date that can be greater than the life expectancy of many new buildings.”
Based on the average embodied carbon intensity of new residential buildings, the carbon cost to replace the Carlton block’s demolished buildings with an equal area equivalent of three lowrise four-storey wooden structure buildings would range from 1,751 tonnes to 2,678 tonnes.
Between 2003 and 2020, Halifax Regional Municipality issued 2,535 demolition permits, and although the overall average is 141 buildings per year, the number of demolition permits has increased steadily, reaching 188 in 2020, Cameron’s report found. From January 2020 to early September of this year, there had been an additional 300 permits issued.
The report says there is no public record of the size or type of buildings that are being demolished, but for perspective on these numbers, assuming an average unit/house size of 1,500 square feet, the demolition permits from 2003 to 2020 is equivalent to the floor area of about 17 city blocks.
“The 2,535 demolitions is almost the same number of demolitions that occurred during Halifax’s urban renewal or slum clearance period between 1958 and 1965. At that time, in the downtown Cogswell area, 2,539 buildings were demolished. … Another comparison is the Halifax Explosion which destroyed approximately 1,600 homes.”
Cameron said large highrises replacing smaller-building neighbourhoods has many negative consequences.
“In small-scaled, mixed-used, older and newer kind of more organic neighbourhoods there are so many advantages to society, not just affordability, business start-ups are more likely to happen there, there’s more diversity, there’s more women-owned businesses, tourists like those kinds of places, young people like those kinds of places,” Cameron said. “There is some kind of verve or action that happens on the street that just doesn’t happen in a new highrise.”
Premier Tim Houston and Housing Minister John Lohr have hammered home their notion that the solution to the Nova Scotia and Halifax housing crisis is to build more housing.
“It’s just simple math,” Houston argued during the waning days of the fall legislature sitting.
“When you have people looking for homes, you build homes. People fill them and that fills them across the spectrum.”
The opposition leaders say the premier’s reasoning is just simplistic. Cameron and a foremost Canadian expert on housing and urban planning agree with the opposition leaders.
“You have all this rhetoric coming in about the shortage of supply and that’s what is driving rents and costs up or prices up,” said Steve Pomeroy, executive adviser and industry professor at the Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative at McMaster University.
“Well if we can get more supply, we’ll fix this problem. I’m saying, no, that’s not actually true. You are offering a significant increase in supply but its supply at the top end of the market and it’s really not helping the affordability issue.”
Pomeroy says rents in newly constructed buildings across Canada are 150 per cent to 160 per cent higher than the average market rent.
“You might knock down a unit that had rented at 80 or 90 per cent of the average market and you come back with a product that’s got three times as many units but they are twice as high in rents, and it’s really not helping the affordability issue,” Pomeroy said.
He estimates that from 2011 and 2016, the number of rental units that would be affordable for households earning less than $30,000 per year — with rents below $750 — declined by 322,600 in Canada.
His analysis of census data over the past five years In Canada finds that for every affordable unit that gets built, at considerable public cost, five are lost, partially through demolitions and redevelopment.
Cameron said solving the housing crisis is all about affordability, “working with what we have, redeveloping empty spaces and making very careful design and material choices so we can accommodate what’s there and reduce the impact that we are having on the environment.”
Pomeroy published the 37-page report Recovery for All for the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness in July 2020, recommending, among other things, that governments must Increase people’s capacity to pay for housing, pursue opportunities to acquire and redeploy existing properties, and pursue options to rapidly expand the stock of permanent supportive housing options.
Not much has changed since the report’s release, he said.
“There were recommendations in that report for a number of government initiatives and program funding, and while the federal government did come up with the rapid housing initiative and has been starting to build some permanent supportive housing, it’s nowhere near the volume that we were calling for,” Pomeroy said.
“The short story is things got worse.”