Developers Plan On Building 900 Residential Units On Old Dartmouth Mall Site
HALIFAX – If all goes according to plan, 25 acres of currently empty land in Dartmouth will someday be home to nearly 900 housing units.
Local companies Crombie REIT and Clayton Developments have a 50-50 partnership to develop the land where the old Penhorn Mall once stood on Portland Street. Besides the commercial strip known as Penhorn Plaza, the large swath of land has been vacant for years after the old mall was demolished.
“There’s still a huge swath of derelict land…and they’re looking to do a residential development on the rest of the site,” said HRM’s Dartmouth councilor Sam Austin.
“It’s been a long time coming. HRM had done a whole community envisioning process back in the early 2010s and late 2000s. And the outcome of that visioning process was broad guidelines as to what would be allowed on site.”
Jason Brunt, president of Clayton Developments believes the area is a perfect spot for residential development. The area will have quick access to Brownlow Park and Penhorn Lake, as well as nearby commercial services.
“What we’re trying to do is really develop more of an urban feel with a big focus on pedestrian connections,” said Brunt. “It already has the transit hub and it already has the commercial block and it already has other amenities surrounding it that are incredibly user friendly.”
“It already has a lot of traffic flow. What we’re trying to do is bring an urban feel to the back of that and make better use of the land behind that commercial complex, while making sure it doesn’t detract from the residential community that already exists there.”
Brunt believes the area will accommodate up to 900 residential units, with five to 10 percent of those units coming in the form of townhouses. He predicts a total investment of $300-million to turn this vision into a reality in the years to come.
The first half of the development will be focused on residential units, but Brunt is hoping to include some more commercial space, like offices, during the second construction phase.
“In the second half of the development, we’ll move more to a mixed-use, trying to incorporate some commercial and potential office uses into the ground floors,” said Brunt. “We’re doing that with most of our masterplans…with the shift to work from home, putting those business uses within the same structure makes better sense than it would have two or three years ago.”
When any new residential development is announced, the residents of Halifax are always interested in the potential for affordable housing. With a high demand for apartments in the fast-growing city, people are seeing rent spikes throughout the HRM.
Brunt said there has been no target set for affordable housing with the Penhorn development, but he is hoping to keep rental prices more “attainable” to the average renter. He explained that Clayton Developments’ own apartments in west Bedford fetch an average rental cost of $1,600 and apartments in downtown Halifax, which go for $2,500 or more. Brunt hopes that the Penhorn units will be less expensive than that.
“I’m sure [the conversation on affordable housing] will come up, but we haven’t identified any percentage or any unit count that would be targeting. What we are trying to do is make sure it doesn’t creep up to downtown rentals,” explained Brunt.
Of course, there is still a long process to go navigate before the shovel hits the dirt on the Penhorn development. Clayton and Crombie are still early in the application phase, so much can change between now and the beginning of construction. It’s impossible for Brunt to predict a timeline for such milestones because, as experience has shown, there’s little consistency on major projects getting the green light.
“I can’t speak to that because it’s been so difficult to forecast how these get processed through the HRM staff,” said Brunt. “Us and several other developers have applications, but none of them seem to follow a consistent approach for timelines.”