Stern, Jo, "Gentrification and Community in the North End of Halifax: Re-examining the issues"

Gottingen Street bisects the North End neighborhood from south to north. Historically, the street was the major commercial axis of the Old Northern Suburb and the life-line of the community. The circumstances that lead to the demise of Gottingen Street as one of Halifax's major shopping thoroughfares tell a story repeated many times in North America - the advent of the private automobile replacing public transportation and pedestrian traffic, the growth of the suburbs, the construction of suburban one-stop shopping malls, "slum" clearance policies of urban renewal which eliminated entire inner-city districts and provided clear downtown lands for commercial redevelopment; all factored in its demise.

This thesis examines the history of Gottingen Street and the neighborhood of Old Northern Suburbs in the context of the post-war reconstruction of Halifax. It places Halifax in the broader context of urban restructuring similar to that which many older regional centres are undergoing in order to examine possible scenarios for future change and it investigates the history behind the fear of change and the apprehensions of displacement and dispersion of the poor and of the black community in particular.

The study concludes that what becomes of the commercial fault-line that bisects the neighborhood is critical to what the neighborhood will be, or even whether there will continue to be a neighborhood in future. Proximity to the Central Business District lends urgency to the problem and renders the less affluent more vulnerable to reduced housing options and further displacement from the peninsula. The neighborhood may undergo further pressure for gentrification as the political economy of the city changes, affecting both those who will be required to work in the evolving downtown, those who will want to live close to their work, and those whose skills and labour will be redundant in the new information and service economy. These shifts in labour markets will necessarily have an adverse effect on those people who have lived longest in the study area, who historically have had the lowest levels of income and of education in the city.

Planners alone cannot solve the kinds of dilemmas presented in this study which are a function of what one author calls "political redlining" and must be understood in the context of the racial politics of the city of Halifax.

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