Architects Against Housing Alienation – Not for Sale!: 6. Surplus Properties

Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) occupied the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2023 with Not for Sale!, their campaign of ten demands for decommodified housing in c\a\n\a\d\a. The following is an extended description of one of these demands and proposal made up of an activist strategy, a plan for implementation, and an architectural project.

By AAHA Surplus Properties contributing team On Aug 14, 2024

A community block-party takes place at the Gerald B. Gray Memorial Arena building. Surrounding the building is a new mix of affordable and market-rate housing. The arena building has been transformed into an open space for various community-driven programs and has a food market that welcomes everybody. This is now a vibrant neighbourhood for living, working, growing food and playing. The buildings in the background show the surrounding context. A diverse group of people are spending time together on the front steps of the project built on surplus land alongside the arena.

Surplus Properties

We demand surplus properties for housing. Canadian governments own substantial urban land and building resources. These lands and buildings are currently seen as a surplus asset to be sold and privatized, but it is worth so much more in public hands. We demand that all levels of government give first right of refusal for the use of this land to Indigenous, or non-profit, organizations for the creation of affordable housing suited to the diverse needs of urban residents.

“This should be housing.” is an independent database built by Halifax coders and journalists working with Halifax Mutual Aid and the Anti Eviction Mapping Project. This project builds on This Should be Housing’s existing database to identify and track high potential parcels.

Municipal, provincial, and federal governments own an immense number of surplus properties that are sitting idle—often in the form of vacant buildings and empty parcels. There are unused schools, empty office blocks, and brownfield sites sitting fallow. This bounty of potential typically suffers two tragic fates: Remaining empty for years on end while housing conditions in c\a\n\a\d\a continue to deteriorate, or being sold off to private developers who go on to transform these properties into new forms of alienation. These already public assets present an immediate and direct route for governments to make a significant contribution to end housing alienation. We demand that these assets be made available for the public good and the development of affordable housing.

The project seeks to understand the role that under-utilized surplus properties can play in reimagining communities through public architecture. Municipal, Provincial, and Federal governments own an immense number of surplus properties that are sitting idle often in the form of vacant buildings and empty parcels.

We have developed a pilot-project for this nationally applicable demand in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the advocacy group This Should Be Housing has mapped the inventory of surplus properties suitable for housing. To demonstrate the viability and immense potential of our demand we have selected a single surplus property currently owned by the Halifax Regional Municipality: The Gray Arena in the Dartmouth neighbourhood. For years the arena structure and the land surrounding it have been underutilized, while the housing shortage in Halifax has become more acute. In fact, the immediate context of the Gray Arena is victim to ongoing predatory capitalism in which large real estate investment companies purchase pre-existing rental stock as investments. We demand the Halifax Regional Municipality make the Gray Arena site available for development of affordable housing now so that it can act as a bulwark against these exploitive practices.

In 1915, housing and assets came hand in hand through the allocation of farmable land for livestock and gardening.

To achieve the optimal use of this property, and similar ones across the country, we propose a mosaic community programming strategy alongside a mosaic funding model. This entails a thorough mapping of the larger existing context to determine a particular set of community needs to be deployed in a pixelated pattern and integrated alongside housing. The resulting design repurposes the existing Gray Arena structure as a vibrant community hub that anchors housing of diverse tenure type and unit sizes. Programmatic pixelation incorporates the necessary breadth to support deeply healthful living, from community gardens to workshop spaces. At the same time a mosaic funding pattern redeploys existing resources in a novel fashion and demonstrates how projects like the redevelopment of Gray Arena are financially feasible within current economic contexts. Indeed, all the public money is already there—it just needs to be mapped, coordinated, and redeployed.