Halifax Mayor Andy Fillmore in favour of buying back property if construction conditions not met.
Nova Scotia- April 30, 2025
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 what 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.