Jim Spatz is talking now, and moving. From his cell phone somewhere in downtown Halifax, he’s describing how he—one of the city’s preeminent property developers—has shaped his world over more than three decades in business. And, how he’s not done yet.

“If you go back years, Halifax was shrinking in the middle and just growing around the periphery, which was not good. It’s never a good thing [when a city has] no real heart, no vibrant downtown, nobody living there,” he said. “But, now, look at all the cranes.”

Spatz, it’s safe to say, loves cranes. Especially the ones he can see with his own eyes from, say, the seventh floor of The Roy Building on Granville Street, home to his real estate development company, Southwest Properties. Just a throw from there is Bishop’s Landing, Southwest’s signature residential-retail-dining development which—when it was built in 2001 for the then-astonishing sum of $30 million—set the tone for the city’s now-endless waterfront revitalization.

Soon, there will be more cranes to see down there, working away on Southwest’s new Cunard Residence, with 231 rental apartments and ground-floor retail spaces. Not far away, the company’s new Seton Ridge—a former Sisters of Charity Motherhouse reimagined as large-scale urban village, with 3,000 residential units and homes—will start taking shape.

“The hole in the donut,” Spatz said, breezing down a busy street to keep an appointment, “is being filled.”

And not a moment too soon.

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