At City Hall, council chambers are getting renovated to become more accessible, so Halifax’s Community Planning and Economic Development Standing Committee met virtually on Thursday Sep. 19.
The meeting was dominated by RadStorm’s plan to buy their 2177 Gottingen Street building, and their request for Halifax’s municipal government to pitch in with some funding. RadStorm members Capp Larsen and Lucas Goudie told the committee that a recent report highlighted Halifax's dire need for more arts spaces, with the lack of all-ages venues being labelled an “urgent gap.” Larsen and Goudie explained to the committee that when kids don’t have venues—like RadStorm—where they can go to shows or concerts before they turn 19, it’s likely they never get into the habit of going to concerts, which is quite detrimental to the long-term health of the music scene in Halifax. They also explained that the RadStorm space can be and is used by all sorts of creative types, of any age, because it’s a space for the community’s artists to rent space to do art.
The Rad presenters told the committee that, unlike the landlords who are using the fixed-term lease loophole to jack up rents, their landlord is cool and holding the price of the building at $450,000 so RadStorm can organize and raise enough funds to buy it. To that end, the folks at RadStorm asked the city for $100,000. The councillors on the community planning committee were cool with spending 1/10th of the cost of repaving a kilometre of road to support the arts, so they made a motion and sent it to council, recommending the city spend $100,000 to subsidize the arts.
Discover Halifax also presented to the committee about its Integrated Tourism Master Plan 2030. They will start working on the plan this month, and expect a report to return to the Community Planning and Economic Development committee in the spring of 2025. This presentation was just for the committee’s information but has a pretty interesting tidbit, mainly that Discover Halifax has partnered with Telus and will conduct some mass surveillance to inform the tourism master plan. This was sent to council.
The committee also got a presentation from a group called the Housing Innovation Cooperative, which wants to see the city provide more education to rural homeowners. The co-op did a study and found that more rural residents would build backyard suites if there was more information about how to do so. While it is true that more information would help, the presenter also pointed out other barriers, like the cost of building a second unit, the lack of infrastructure to support an increase in population and the extra responsibilities of being a landlord.
Finally, the committee wanted to know how Halifax can better host big parties and asked for a staff report on creating a framework for major events.
