A planned expansion of a North end Halifax car dealership has got local residents up in arms about the loss of their neighbourhood.
Colonial Honda, owned by Steele Auto Group has been a fixture on Robie Street in Halifax for the past 40 years.
Cramped for space, the dealership recently purchased 25 nearby residential and business properties with the plan of demolishing 17 of them to expand their car lot.
“Honda is a wonderful product, being able to better serve our customers in a location that is convenient is our goal,” Dave Macritchie, president of Steele Auto Group said in an email.
The expansion of the car lot is concerning for some who live in the area.
“I think there is reason to be concerned with the loss of housing in that particular area,” HRM councillor Jennifer Watts said Monday.
“There are a number of properties there that people have lived in, its a little tiny neighbourhood.”
Despite the concern, Watts says the company is following the rules.
“The zoning allows for this use. It’s under C2 zoning, so there are very few things that the zoning doesn’t allow.”
“How could a whole corporation buy up a whole neighbourhood?”
Representatives from Colonial Honda did want to do an on-camera interview Monday, but in a statement to Global News, said that most of the homes they have purchased were rental properties with a high vacancy rate.
“I can’t understand why the city would let this happen,” said Bonita Fraser, who has lived near the car dealer for the past 22 years. She is refusing to sell her home.
“How could a whole corporation buy up a whole neighbourhood and the city and the mayor and the people that you elected, don’t even know?,” Fraser said.
Colonial Honda says there is no timeline yet for when the homes will be demolished.
Since the plans were announced, more than 1,000 people have signed an online petition asking the dealership to reconsider their expansion plans.
The group Friends of the Halifax Common says other neighbourhoods in the city are also being threatened by demolition.
There is currently a plan in the works to remove four homes and build a condo development on Wellington Street.
“There’s something between 45 and 50 houses that are about to be destroyed or threatened to be destroyed and often those are affordable housing or they’re important mixed-use commercial and residential, in what we’re supposed to be achieving is walkable neighbourhoods,” said Peggy Cameron with Friends of the Halifax Common.
Cameron says demolishing residential or commercial properties has a big impact on their surrounding neighbourhood, like the current destruction of the Old Cleveland House on Young Avenue in the South end of Halifax.
Cameron says she would like to see the municipality tighten the rules around these types of permits.
“It’s really a crisis because I believe the urban fabric, the experience of what is authentic in Halifax, is under attack,” said Cameron.
Meanwhile, the city is currently hosting a series of four meetings over the next two weeks to discuss their Centre Plan Project — a municipal planning strategy that will help the city implement tools and guide land use and development.
Tiffany Chase, spokesperson for the municipality, says they are hoping residents will come out to the workshops and provide feedback.
“We are looking at existing land use policies and bylaws that are currently in place in the Halifax peninsula area and the Dartmouth urban core area as well. Looking to see if we need to update those, many of them were written a number of years ago,” Chase said.
“The Halifax peninsula municipal planning strategy was written in 1978.”
The first workshop took place on Monday afternoon in Dartmouth. You can find the schedule for the other meeting times and locations here.
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