Manny Grosse, 73, has lived his whole life in Halifax, most of it in public housing.
So have eight of his 10 siblings who, like Grosse, moved into public housing and started families there.
It didn’t begin that way.
Grosse was baby No. 7 when his parents, Henry and Irene Grouse, were renting on Jacob Street. Their neighbourhood, just south of where Cogswell and Brunswick streets met, saw poor and working-class families living in wooden tenements dating back to the 1800s.
But in the 1960s, those Victorian-era homes on 10 blocks were bulldozed in the name of urban renewal. White, immigrant and many Black families, including the Grouses, were forced out to make way for the Cogswell interchange and the massive concrete buildings that were constructed around it.
Six decades later, that interchange, which came to be viewed as a gigantic urban planning mistake and an eyesore, has been demolished. It has opened up some 6.5 hectares of land — the size of 21 football fields — for redevelopment once again.
Sitting at the heart of it is a piece of land that serves as a reminder of a forgotten community, and now also the hope of an African Nova Scotian group to build a new community on its own terms.
It’s called Parcel D.
The uprooting of Black families from the Cogswell area was part of a larger pattern of displacing Black residents, including the razing of Africville, a historic Black settlement of 400 families.
Shawn Grouse, Grosse’s son, said more than homes have been lost.
“The importance of having community and other people around you, and loved ones, and people who can support you, and tell you that anything and everything is possible — those are the aspects of when communities are destroyed, that people get displaced,” said Grouse.
“People of African ancestry, we really rely and depend upon each other,” he said.
The Cogswell families were moved into Mulgrave Park — a housing project funded in part by the federal government — and later, Uniacke Square. There weren’t enough units, however, so some people — particularly those who were childless — were sent farther away.
The displacement started a dependence on public housing and social assistance — one that exists to this day, said Treno Morton, 26, who wants to break the cycle.
With a Queen’s University degree in planning and geography, and a drive for change, he heads up New Roots Community Land Trust, a non-profit group whose objective is to reclaim land where Cogswell families lived to restore housing and economic opportunities as a legacy for displaced Black residents.
He was raised by his mother in Uniacke Square with Cogswell and Africville residents, some of whom had owned their homes and were cheated out of their properties through “trickery and tactics done by the city to get people to sell,” said Morton.
“So you’re selling your home for pennies on the dollar and moving into land that you don’t own, and that was the big, the really big thing.”
Without property, the path to owning a business was cut off. The relocation made getting ahead even harder.
“It was sold to us as transition housing with educational and job opportunities. But those never materialized,” he said.
When the Cogswell Street Interchange was built in the late 1960s, a community was erased. Now that roadway itself is gone, there are calls for Halifax to make things right for the people it displaced decades ago.
The land trust is setting its sights on Parcel D, one of five chunks of land owned by Halifax that the city hopes to sell to recover costs. The lot is located behind Brunswick Place, the former Trade Mart building, and bounded by Cogswell, Barrington and Upper Water streets.
The non-profit’s dream is to work in partnership with social agencies and developers to build two 30-storey towers with more than 400 units for people from all walks of life, to avoid the stigma of being “relegated” or “othered,” which Black public housing residents are faced with, Morton said.
“My overarching goal is just to live like everyone else, have community,” he said.
The vision includes deeply affordable apartments for African Nova Scotians, prioritizing youth and seniors, with room for a daycare or community space, and Black-owned businesses.
The land trust is asking the city to turn over Parcel D as “reparations” that are “needed and deserved” to help heal the harm of displacement and unfulfilled promises.
He said Black displacement is a form of discrimination that has shrunk hopes and aspirations.
“We have fourth-, fifth-generation families living here [in public housing], and just no signs of moving out. And you can’t help but blame the city for that,” said Morton.
The municipality said a staff report on the land trust’s proposal is being put together and is expected to go before council for deliberation early this fall.
Jean Dunn, 75, remembers a happy childhood in the Cogswell area. She had lots of neighbourhood friends, and everything her family needed was there.
“I didn’t see it as the slums when I was there because we were sort of all in the same boat,” said Dunn.
“We were happy with our lot in life.”
Her parents, Lloyd Sugar and Isabell Borden, were eventually able to rent an entire home owned by a Black woman from Barbados. But when she was 12, the Bordens were forced to move the family.
They were rehoused in Mulgrave Park. She recalls friends who wouldn’t visit, taxis that wouldn’t stop.
She realized the stigma had moved with her, she said, something that “a lot of people struggled to rise above.”
“I think for some people … it beats them down and makes them believe it. And there are other people that say, ‘No, I can rise above this, watch me,'” she said.
Her parents lived the rest of their lives in public housing. But they wanted their three daughters to have a place of their own.
“It was important because neither of our parents had owned a home. We fulfilled the prophecy,” she said.
‘I felt a part of something’
For Grosse, who began his life on Jacob Street, there was no generational wealth to give his family a head start. He and his then wife raised their two children in Mulgrave Park. Both children were about 30 by the time they were able to move out.
Grosse said he never thought about leaving public housing — it became his world.
“Why’d I need the house? I’m living good,” said Grosse.
His son has positive memories of Mulgrave Park, too.
“I felt grounded, I felt loved, I felt a part of something,” said Grouse.
Still, he’s grateful to have broken the cycle of public housing. Unlike his father and most of his 10 aunts and uncles, he found a way to own a home of his own.
His example is his grandparents, a labourer and a hospital cleaner, who tried twice and were eventually able to buy a house near Gottingen Street, close to other Black families. Grouse believes they didn’t share the dream of home ownership with their children to protect them from the barriers they had to overcome.
Today, Grosse lives in Greystone, on the outskirts of Halifax, with his stepson, step-grandchild, and a tortoiseshell cat.
Emotions are stirred up as he reflects on his parents’ accomplishments.
“Now that I actually go through all this stuff, figure they did a great job,” he said.
For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.
