As the Bloomfield saga drags on, a Toronto developer laments what could have been

Thousands of condos and apartments have been built, there's a soccer pitch, community and cultural centres, a grocery store and much more, all part of a massive redevelopment of a once neglected downtown Toronto neighbourhood.

It's hard to imagine a sharper contrast than between the transformation of that city's Regent Park neighbourhood and the ever-stalled redevelopment of Halifax's perennial municipal headache, the former Bloomfield school site on Agricola Street. 

All the more painfully apparent because the developer behind the Regent Park project tried, but failed, more than a decade ago to convince Halifax officials of the day that they should follow a similar model with Bloomfield.

"Bloomfield, I believe, is, was, a lost opportunity, a missed opportunity for the city," says Mitchell Cohen, the chief executive of Daniels Corp., the company behind the work in Regent Park.

In 2012, his company submitted a proposal to the Halifax Regional Municipality to do for Bloomfield, which the city was trying to off-load, something similar to the work Daniels Corp. was already doing in Toronto on a far bigger scale.

In essence, it would be a public-private partnership. Daniels wouldn't try to buy the Bloomfield land or compete with other developers to be the top bidder. Instead, it would partner with the city, Cohen said. There would be a mix of market and affordable housing, and community space.

Some of the details were undefined, Cohen said, but that was the point. The project would be shaped by the needs and desires of the community in the area, especially the local group Imagine Bloomfield, a method emulating the Regent Park model.

Daniels Corp. would make money on the for-profit aspects of the project. For its part, the municipality would have "skin in the game," he said, and would still own the land, giving it a greater say over what was built. 

But instead of apartment units and community buy-in, 13 years later the most that's happened to the Bloomfield site are the excavators brought in a few weeks ago to demolish the vacant and dilapidated buildings still intact following a February fire.

The Daniels proposal all those years ago "didn't tick all the boxes" and was effectively "thrown out" by city officials, Cohen said. While Toronto made a "courageous decision" with Regent Park, he said there was "zero" response from Halifax.  

"All of the things that we would have done at Bloomfield, we have done at scale," said Cohen, who has written a book called Rhythms of Change, Reflections on the Regent Park Revitalization.

The Bloomfield land is one of three former school sites on the Halifax peninsula the city sold to developers in 2020 and 2021, but which have languished ever since.

Halifax Mayor Andy Fillmore, who was elected last fall, said he doesn't want to dwell on what's gone wrong, but it's clear the city must impose tighter redevelopment timelines and conditions for those who buy land from the municipality in the future.

"I would like to see properties not sitting as long as this and others have sat," he said in an interview at the Bloomfield site, as an excavator sorted and piled demolition debris.

In the case of Bloomfield, the city first tried to sell the site in 2012, but a surprise $15-million bid by the provincial Crown agency Housing Nova Scotia fell apart within four years. The property was subsequently sold to Banc Investments Ltd. in 2021 for about $22 million.

Banc also paid the city $37.6 million for the former St. Patrick's High School site on Quinpool Road, now a field. The company has not responded to requests for comment about its plans for either site.

Not far away, the sale of the long-vacant St. Patrick's-Alexandra school to a developer finally closed in 2020. A demolition permit was issued mid-April.

All three sites have buyback agreements, where the municipality can repurchase the property if construction hasn't begun by a certain date. In the case of Bloomfield, that deadline is next January. The city would need to pay 90 per cent of purchase price — just less than $20 million.

Fillmore said he's in favour of doing so if construction does not get underway, violating the terms of the sale agreement, and he argues it would be a good deal for the city because the value of the land has "appreciated terrifically" since 2021. 

"I think it's absolutely incumbent on a city government to take action so that we don't have derelict building sites in the middle of a housing crisis," he said.

But Susanna Fuller, who was part of the Imagine Bloomfield community group, is dubious the majority of municipal councillors will agree to spend millions of dollars repurchasing the land.

One of the lessons, she said, is for the city to put in much more stringent provisions and timelines for development when it sells land. If those are broken, the buyback price should be well below the original sale price, she said, or perhaps the property should even be forfeited back to the city.

There would be a trade-off, of course. Developers taking on more risk would be unwilling to pay the same high prices they would for land that came with no strings attached.

"The way that we sell off public property really needs to be overhauled," she said.

"Our city shouldn't have the deciding factor be how much money developers are paying. It should be what is the public good that could come out of this site, particularly on the peninsula where we cannot make more land."

Fillmore is a former urban planner with the city and had worked with Imagine Bloomfield, but he left his role with the municipality before the 2012 decision to sell the site to Housing Nova Scotia.