News, Monday, April 20
City Budget: Arts called essential to Toronto’s vitality
It may seem counterintuitive at a time of local belt-tightening in the midst of a worldwide recession, but when Toronto city councillors passed the city’s annual budget this week, they actually increased spending on culture.
Specifically, the $45 million budget for the Community Partnership and Investment Program – which brings arts into neighbourhoods across the city and gives hope and opportunity to young people living hardscrabble lives – is up 2 per cent.
Culture spending in the $8.7 billion budget also continued to support a range of cultural institutions both large and small, from the National Ballet of Canada to Arts Scarborough.
Energy: What Americans Don’t Know Can Hurt Us
Four in 10 Americans can’t name a fossil fuel, according to the new Energy Learning Curve survey released by Public Agenda in association with Planet Forward. Even more, 51 percent, can’t accurately name a renewable energy source. Fewer than half know how much renewable energy we use now, and two-thirds overestimate how much oil we get from the Middle East. Almost all Americans believe we’ve got more oil in the U.S. than we really do.
Dust to Dust Energy Report - Automotive
Vancouver Convention Center’s Six-acre Green Roof
Comment: Toronto’s misguided transit expansion
Sprawl in Toronto just got its biggest boost in 50 years, thanks to Premier Dalton McGuinty’s decision to stimulate the economy through a $9-billion spending spree on transportation infrastructure. Look for Toronto to bust out all over — north, east and west — in line with the major routes he promises to fund. And look for low-density sprawl to spread to Toronto’s detriment, just as occurred with the uneconomic transportation infrastructure built in the past.
Ottawa: City counting on 22-per-cent increase in street parking revenue
The City of Ottawa is counting on a new pay-and-display system for city parking spaces to increase revenues by 22 per cent.
The city will be selecting a company to run a new on-street parking system with pay-and-display machines rather than meters. The 10-year deal will see almost all of the city’s meters replaced. Pay-and-display machines are generally more reliable than meters and they allow more cars to park than separate metered spaces do, and they mean drivers can’t take advantage of time left on meters by previous parkers.
Toronto a suburb? It’s begun: The city’s a nice place to live but it’s being eclipsed by economic powerhouses in the 905, report warns
Toronto is at risk of becoming a bedroom community for the booming 905 regions, warns a new report by the Toronto Board of Trade.
Cities that were once outer suburbs are now growing employment areas as more businesses have pulled up stakes in the downtown core for cheaper real estate.
Meanwhile, the city itself faces increasing disparity between the wealthy, who buy downtown condos where factories once stood, and the poor who inhabit the increasingly deprived inner suburbs.
The Power of Community in Marketing: Rethink marketing and reinvent your business
Here’s a nice visual of what cities will look like when the livable streets movement has completely emerged from the wilderness (sorry for the extended metaphor, couldn’t help it today). GOOD Magazine ran this photosim done by our very own Carly Clark in their transportation issue, with text by Streetsblog Editor-in-Chief Aaron Naparstek. They’ve got a whole interactive graphic that walks you through the elements of a livable street, and — hats off to my coworkers — it looks great.
Welcome to the new politics of scarcity: How Elite Environmentalists Impoverish Blue-Collar Americans
Saving The Industrial Heartland
You would think an economic development official in Michigan these days would be contemplating either early retirement or seppuku. Yet the feisty Ron Kitchens, who runs Southwest Michigan First out of Kalamazoo, sounds almost giddy with the future prospects for his region.
How can that be? Where most of America sees a dysfunctional state tied down by a dismal industry, Kitchens points to the growth of jobs in his region in a host of fields, from business services to engineering and medical manufacturing. Indeed, as most Michigan communities have lost jobs this decade, the Kalamazoo region, with roughly 300,000 residents, has posted modest but consistent gains.
Lessons our politicians can learn from Buffalo: Don’t do what we did
Pittsburgh or Buffalo? Pondering the possibility of a future without steel, Hamilton leaders would do well to study the successes and failures from each of those nearby Rust Belt cities. Both places lost massive steel industries more than a generation ago and responded in radically different ways.
When regional chair, I befriended two visionary political leaders from those cities, former Erie County Executive Joel Giambra and former Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy. They taught me about the challenge of governing a declining city in urban America — a tougher job than here because of crime and racial discord.
Tiny Saskatchewan town turns carbon trap into cash: Weyburn, pop. 10,000 pushes province onto global warming frontier
Ex-mayor documents high costs of suburbia
Recessions may not be fun, but they can be useful. In southern Ontario, the slowdown presents an ideal moment to stop and take a look at who controls growth, and to what end.
Since the 1950s, of course, the development industry has been in the driver’s seat. It does what it does, and very well, but few would disagree that the sprawl it has left us has created more problems than it solved. And in the years ahead, those problems will grow worse.
In his highly informative new book, The Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto’s Sprawl, former Toronto mayor John Sewell examines the local history of suburbia and includes facts and figures that in themselves tell a fascinating, if damning, tale.
Our cities are good, but they’ll need to be a lot better: Richard Florida
The Wall Street Journal reports that an increasing number of energy analysts think that US gasoline sales will never surpass their 2007 record:
Among those who say U.S. consumption of gasoline has peaked are executives at the world’s biggest publicly traded oil company, Exxon Mobil Corp., as well as many private analysts and government energy forecasters…
Many industry observers have become convinced the drop in consumption won’t reverse even when economic growth resumes. In December, the EIA said gasoline consumption by U.S. drivers had peaked, in part because of growing consumer interest in fuel efficiency.
Pedestrian Sprawl Alert: Streets Gone Wild
…I can only call this phenomenon, where the powers that be openly and willingly promote the trend of foot traffic putting the squeeze on our American right to drive where we need to, Pedestrian Sprawl….
Only a few months ago, I admonished Michigan for its hysteria about brain drain. Given the recent news coverage concerning the exodus from the recession-plagued state, you might expect I’m ready to eat some crow. On the contrary, I’m here to report that Michigan has learned nothing from its past mistakes.
Richard Herman, an advocate for increasing rates of immigration to the Rust Belt, posts on his blogthe same critique I have aired about how Michigan addresses its talent crisis:
However, the current focus on “brain drain” as the source of the problem misses the real issue.
While no doubt the Midwest economy is causing college grads who might otherwise want to stay home to leave, in an ever more mobile society, moving out is a natural part of people’s lives. Indeed, if you read the typical account of how the elite global knowledge worker lives, you often hear about people flitting from place to place to place chasing opportunity.
The real problem is not that too many people are leaving, but rather that too few are coming. It isn’t an outflow problem, it’s an inflow problem.
Bioethanol’s Impact On Water Supply Three Times Higher Than Once Thought
This piece from Worldchanging looks at the Seattle-area city of Ballard. It’s a “20-minute city”, where people can get to practically everything they’d want or need to within a 20-minute walk.
“These 20-minute cities already exist. By recording these developments, we aim to chronicle local community efforts to create a more dense and sustainable city.
What Does Urban Success Look Like?
Don Mills centre will be the anti-mall
But don’t be fooled by the location; the new development is far from suburban. Instead of the ubiquitous big box full of the usual retail suspects, this venue, “Ontario’s first outdoor urban village,” is made up of shops, restaurants, offices and residential units organized around a square and a network of narrow tree-lined streets.
Gentrification meets low-income housing: Owner of new coffee shop, with social housing upstairs, is betting on the neighbourhood’s future
In a year like this, we need a city upon a hill. Seattle, Fast Company’s City of the Year, not only sprawls across seven hills but also boasts the ingredients that we believe will bring our communities — and country — back to prosperity: smarts, foresight, social consciousness, creative ferment. This year, singular bright ideas have earned 12 other cities — Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Houston, Malmö, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Taipei, Tucson, and Vancouver — places on our honor roll. Their exemplary initiatives are improving neighborhoods, transforming lives, and helping build better, faster cities for the future.
Wind man of India sets sights on Ontario: Asia’s biggest turbine maker thinks province has the right policies, infrastructure for wind power
Clear the way, here come truck trains:
Transport trucks pulling two trailers instead of one – so-called “road trains” – are coming to Ontario this summer and raising questions about safety for motorists.
Only 100 of the rigs will be allowed on the road in a year-long pilot project and the trucks, called “long combination vehicles” in industry jargon, will face strict restrictions on when, where and how fast they can drive and how much weight they can carry, said Transportation Minister Jim Bradley.
From Malls to Homes to Cars, the Transitioning of Suburbia
Canada’s Greenest Cities of Tomorrow
Our cities are leading the way to a cleaner urban future. Find out which ones will get there first. You’re in for a few surprises.
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Re: Arts called essential to Toronto’s vitality
Though not an artist myself, I think investing in the arts culture is EXACTLY one of the things we ought to be doing right now, and NOT investing in the union culture that is obviously plagued our society. I sure hope that the WSO is successful in obtaining the use of the Armories Building for their Adaptive Re-use Project. The best part is that this project will be FREE to the citizens of Windsor, all that is required is that the council must allow them use of the building. ($0 down, priceless investment… how can you go wrong?)
That article on Buffalo is frighteningly familiar. Remove Buffalo and replace with Windsor and it’s almost an exact copy of what we’ve done or are about to do.
“..that this city is in free-fall.”
Car culture behind plan to pave park in Oshawa
http://www.thestar.com/GTA/Columnist/article/621652
CHRISTOPHER HUME
Even if the North American automobile industry hadn’t run itself into the ground, Oshawa would be a city in decline.
The “City that Motovates Canada” lost its direction long ago.
Some Oshawans will tell you the community has yet to recover from the death of automaker Col. Sam McLaughlin, who shuffled off this mortal coil in 1972, aged 101.
As hard as that may be to believe, perhaps it’s true.
Certainly, Oshawa council’s recent decision to sell part of a neighbourhood park to a developer, and at a bargain-basement price, provides further evidence – if any were needed – that this is a city in free-fall.
Over the decades, Oshawa has made every mistake in the book. It’s now little more than a hollowed-out downtown surrounded by sprawl.
Even when the city was chosen as the site of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, it did exactly the wrong thing and built a commuter campus at the north end of town, a place accessible only by car. Instead of putting it downtown to help create a critical mass of activity that would help sustain the community, the city opted for dispersal.
In the meantime, the space opened up in the city by the demise of its main employer, General Motors, sits largely empty.
Still, the irony of selling land in Chopin Park for a parking lot is apparently lost on a political leadership that remains mired in a discredited mid-20th century mindset. In fact, the more one considers the sad story of Oshawa, the more one realizes it is a community that has been destroyed by the car as much as its own ineptitude. Just as Highway 401 cuts through the heart of town, the auto industry, unable to keep up with the times, slices through its soul.
And so it comes as no surprise that a place dominated by car culture should be willing to sacrifice its public realm to accommodate a developer’s desire for a number of extra parking spots.
The fact is that like GM, Oshawa has lost its ability to adapt, innovate, change and grow. Locked into a mentality of self-destruction, it has allowed itself to ossify. Its collective imagination, like its self-respect, has dried up.
When in doubt, it simply sells off a bit more land, adds another subdivision, and hopes for the best.
The failure to keep up is hardly unique; the world, let alone southern Ontario, has no end of ghost towns, if not ghost empires. But what makes Oshawa’s case so compelling are the many natural advantages it had to squander to get where it finds itself today. It has a waterfront (though you’d never know it), proximity to the largest market in Canada as well as decades of prosperity behind it.
Yet if ever there were a community that needed to rethink itself from the bottom up, this is it. But that’s exactly what it won’t – and can’t – do. Radical action isn’t an option for a city unable to overcome its past.
How appropriate that the other big story in Oshawa these days is a city-hall promoted effort to get that most tired of ’80s pop bands, KISS, to come out of retirement to play there. If any city deserves KISS, it’s Oshawa, a place where everything new is old again.
Even when the federal government committed $9.2 million earlier this month to start the cleanup of Oshawa harbour, the announcement was greeted with something less than universal joy. Regardless of what some may think, it marks the first time in ages someone’s looking to the city’s future rather than wallowing in its past.
I’m hoping the DWBIA is open to all kinds of suggestions regarding their current focus on parking in our downtown, and would be open to ideas - like the pay-and-display switch occuring in Ottawa.
If I didn’t read the headline I woud have thought that article was about Windsor.
Self created messes got us here in the first place. The “change the conversation” to only what I want to hear has done the same amount of damage.
Now imagine if we actually fostered dialogue to change the course we are on the possibilities would be endless! It isn’t as if we are on a slot car track without the ability to get off the current course. We Can! If we had the political will to do it and the residents to come forward with ideas.
Canada’s Greenest Cities of Tomorrow feature also includes a “Back Of The Pack”, showing who has the furthest to go, lumping “you-know-who” in with the oil patch and chemical valley!
The article by Christopher Hume is about Windsor, we have been and are no different than Oshawa. The only saving grace in one instant above is that we have developed our waterfront, although it is still to passive and boring in my opinion. Windsor has squandered the boom times of the auto industry with nothing to show for it. We’ve gutted our core for malls, big boxers and suburban sprawl. Like Buffalo above we built an arena that is only accessible by car, forget the hour or so bus ride to get there.
And to paraphrase the above: “The fact is that like GM, Windsor has lost its ability to adapt, innovate, change and grow. Locked into a mentality of self-destruction, it has allowed itself to ossify. Its collective imagination, like its self-respect, has dried up.” I make this a general statement of the population, knowing that there a glimmers of hope scattered across this city.
What was Chris’s new word a while back? Miasma - an unwholesome or foreboding atmosphere.
I have to disagree with comparing Windsor to Oshawa. There is no comparison other than we share the same sprawl philosophy.
First, Oshawa is toast. Even if they try to undo all the errors of the past it would take 50 to 100 years to get to where Windsor is today. Unfortunately, the development in Oshawa is like an upside-down wedding cake. It is totally wrong. There is very little by the waterfront and go-train line. In the middle, there is a hollowed-out downtown. And then, there is lots and lots of sprawl everywhere else. And it is unaffordable and all built to meet the needs of a maxed-out consumer to boot. Oshawa is toast.
Second, in Windsor while we don’t have mountains to limit our sprawl we did have a faltering economy that did the same over the last few years. We still don’t realize how lucky we were to miss the wild excesses of this historic credit bubble.
Third, Oshawa does not have the potential Windsor has. Oshawa is simply a distant suburb of Toronto. Windsor is at the centre of the continental gateway. We are at the crossroads to North America. Wow, what potential.
Edwin,
You couldn’t be any more wrong.
Oshawa toast? You mean the City that has a rental vacancy rate just below 5 percent compared to over 15 percent in Windsor.
The faltering economy has not limited sprawl. Drive down County Road 22 through Lakeshore to see the wonderful example of urban growth. Miss the credit bubble? If that were true, explain why the assessed value of my property fell in 2008?
The fact that Oshawa is a ‘distant’ suburb of Toronto is the best thing it has going. It doesn’t have to rely on a single sector for jobs. Should GM ever shutdown in Oshawa, there are far more job opportunities in the surrounding area than there are in the Windsor area.
The whole notion of Windsor becoming a continental gateway is laughable. Given the roadblocks that the US is putting up at the border, a company would more likely want to locate near Detroit Metro airport then at the Windsor airport.
Vincent,
Having moved from Oshawa to Windsor, I can tell you from first hand experience that there is no difference between the Oshawa economy and the Windsor economy other than Windsor is in a post-consumer, post credit bubble situation and Oshawa is not.
When I left Oshawa GM was still hiring, construction was booming, consumption was an unstoppable force, and all assets were rising. Not so today.
While the stats, like scars after a battle, attest to the tough slog that Windsor has gone thru they also point to the great fall Oshawa can expect.
Of course, the bank of Canada did not print money or lower rates to almost zero or the Canadian and Ontario government go into massive deficits to help Windsor out (like now). So, Oshawa will not fall as hard as Windsor. But, we should rise much faster. My opinion only (let’s watch the stats going forward).