Area lags province in educationAlmost 25% in Windsor-Essex lack high school diploma … Really! It couldn’t be because of the easy jobs in the auto factories?

Anne Jarvis: Windsor lacks vision see above!

Sustainability is Gaining Ground

If we are going to save ourselves, we have to stop being so stupid.

It’s a blunt message but a necessary one, according to Mike Harcourt. The former Vancouver mayor and former B.C. premier has spent the past 12 years since leaving politics evangelizing about urban sustainability and he knows that the very mention of the subject can cause dinner companions to nod off in their soup.

Harcourt is on a roster of speakers for Gaining Ground that includes Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and Portland Mayor Sam Adams along with dozens of authors, top political apparatchiks, former oil company advisers, academics and green economy entrepreneurs.

Social integration, double devolution and strategic planning are great topics for the Gaining Ground Summit on urban sustainability coming to Vancouver next week, but when you are talking to those people who have not yet drunk the Sustainability Kool-Aid a more direct approach is in order.

“In a few years time, the people who are living in 5,000-square-foot McMansions on an acre cut out of a farmer’s field and commuting for three or four hours a day will be like smokers,” Harcourt said. “Pathetic and stupid.”

Toronto now bedroom community for 905, report finds

Is Windsor becoming a bedroom community?

If you ask Les Liversidge why he left Toronto for Markham, he is quick to answer: “It was the business taxes, principally the tax bill on the building itself that did it.”

Four years ago, the 55-year-old lawyer owned a building in north Toronto out of which he ran a small firm that practised occupational safety and workers’ compensation law. His dilemma was property taxes — they had gone through the roof.

Taxes are one factor — albeit a major one — that have helped push the city of Toronto down the list on the FP/ Canadian Federation of Independent Business rankings of entrepreneurial cities. Toronto is now dead last on a list of 96, while suburban Toronto, known as the 905 district, sits at 33. The evidence is clear that businesses, some with a need to stay close to Toronto, are opting for the suburbs.

At one point, Mr. Liversidge said he was paying $4,000 to $6,000 in taxes on the 1½-storey building he occupied from 1992 to 2005, but a new assessment on the property put the tax at $65,000 to $70,000. Increases were capped by legislation but, even with the cap, his bill jumped to $27,000.

He could see the writing on the wall.

Mr. Liversidge owned a property that was only going to get more expensive to run.

There was no decision. He picked up his practice, which includes four employees, and moved to Markham — about seven kilometres away.

Graffiti gangs chant: Knit one, purl two

Yarnbomb – verb.To gently fasten knitted and crocheted works to public surfaces as cozy, impermanent graffiti: The kindergarten teacher yarnbombed a pole in the park with a stocking stitch in shades of blue and green.

Hume: Tolls might jolt drivers into reality

The point was made to me a couple of years ago by another cabbie, this one in Stockholm. By his own admission, he was aghast when road tolls, or congestion taxes as they call them in the Swedish capital, were introduced several years ago. Being eminently sensible people, however, the Swedes adopted the program for an experimental seven-month period. By the time the trial was over, the driver said, he had changed his mind completely. The reduction in traffic, in the order of 20 per cent, made his job a whole lot less stressful.

What happened to Canada’s education advantage?

We steered away just as the world was entering the knowledge economy

Higher Jobless Rates Could Become The “New Normal”

WASHINGTON — Even with an economic revival, many U.S. jobs lost during the recession may be gone forever and a weak employment market could linger for years.

That could add up to a “new normal” of higher joblessness and lower standards of living for many Americans, some economists are suggesting.

The words “it’s different this time” are always suspect. But economists and policy makers say the job-creating dynamics of previous recoveries can’t be counted on now.

Sustainable strip malls

MAKING SUBURBAN STRIP MALLS MORE ECO-POSITIVE

BY PAUL TEREFENKO

The winning design from Ryerson students Dov Feinmesser, Yekaterina Mityuryayeva, Tommy Tso, and Aaron Hendershott tackles the suburban strip-mall – a car-centric destination devoid of civic interaction and an outpost of unsustainable mid-century Toronto life.

We’ve all got dreams. Yours might involve a gryphon riding a unicorn riding a narwhal through a rainbow and down an urban green roof waterfall (I wish I could find an appropriate link for that), but some people are more realistic – like the winners of CitiesAlive Student Design Challenge, announced just prior to the start of the World Green Roof Infrastructure Conference across the street from City Hall.

Two of the top three winning plans are from Toronto, as is an honourable mention, and all are in the realm of possibility.

Good Parks Make Good Cities

“Ms. Miller, who’s descended from a long line of enthusiastic soil dabblers, was born in New York and grew up in Washington, D.C. While trying in vain to make a living with her abstract landscapes, she took classes at the New York Botanical Garden for her own edification and enrichment.”

“”People tell me they can recognize one of my gardens,” said Ms. Miller. “I think it’s because I plant in large groups with attention to texture and form and color, not just with the flowers but with the plants themselves.”"

Do Bikes Need to Stop?

Cities are struggling with the right way to control bicycle traffic in a system built for cars. Should bicycles act like cars? Or should roads change to meet the special needs of bicycles?

Will the Upcoming Wave Of Boomer Retirement Sink Canadian Small Businesses?

The next 10 years will see 50 per cent of Boomer small business(1) owners retiring. Despite these numbers, a new BMO Retirement Institute Report predicts several factors will help prevent this retirement wave from punishing the Canadian economy

Grand residential vision unveiled for South St.

What eventually happens to the hospital buildings near the Thames River, however, will be a dominant issue for the proposed redevelopment

Dream big.

That was the undeniable message yesterday from London city designers and planners as they unveiled three-dimensional images of what might one day replace the hulking hospital buildings that block the view of the Thames River from South St.

The hospital facilities south of the street would be gone, replaced by residential buildings with ground-floor cafes and stores that open to a promenade that restores the connection between community and river.

The buildings themselves would be models of urban design, rising only a couple of storeys near the street and promenade, to blend with the mostly-residential neighbourhood south of Horton St., known as SoHo.

More Americans Living Car-Free

“Whether because of cost, convenience or environmental awareness, a small but growing number of people are making individual decisions to get rid of their automobiles and rely on public transportation, car-sharing programs and rental cars.

‘There’s a cultural change taking place,’ said John Casesa, a veteran auto industry analyst and partner in the Casesa Shapiro Group. ‘It’s partly because of the severe economic contraction. But younger consumers are viewing an automobile with a jaundiced eye. They don’t view the car the way their parents did, and they don’t have the money that their parents did.’”

Imagine the smart city

Imagine a personalized transit system, where you call a transit vehicle to your home and it arrives automatically piloted on a monorail. This is one of the new forms of public transit being experimented with. And it is one of the many new ideas that flow from the concept of smart cities.

“Smart cities is a bit of a twist on smart growth, a term that emerged from the U.S. in the mid-1990s,” said Ray Tomalty, adjunct professor in the School of Urban Planning at McGill University and principal of Smart Cities Research Services. Al Gore was an early adopter and promoter of the smart-growth concept, which quickly got picked up by government and community groups already working on the issue of how cities grow and the impact of that growth on the environment.”

In effect, smart growth is an urban planning, land-use and transportation movement focused on building “urban villages” and stopping urban sprawl. “It’s about compact growth,” Prof. Tomalty says. “The goal is to have residential, commercial and recreational destinations within biking and walking distance so that people don’t need to drive. Smart growth means building liveable communities without hurting the environment; communities that are healthy socially and economically and environmentally.”

Smart cities has since also morphed into another meaning: wired and technologically advanced. Think smart houses, smart buildings, IT infrastructure, smarter systems, intelligent utility networks, smarter supply chains and smart transportation - as in automatically piloted personal transit systems.

DAH! You would think that with Windsor’s proximity to the U.S this could be a given:

Ottawa lags U.S. cities in wedding culture, business

Creative resources can generate economic opportunity, expert tells officials

Canada has cities with lots of creative and tolerant people, but it falls short of the United States in turning culture into tangible economic benefits, Richard Florida told officials at City Hall Friday.

Florida, an author and business professor at the University of Toronto, said cities such as Ottawa have huge potential for the coming post-industrial economic age in North America.

The American-born expert made his name advancing a theory that cities prosper when they’re attractive to a “creative class” of artists, high-tech workers, musicians and gays. On Friday, he said Ottawa has 40 per cent of its workforce in the creative class of the economy, when the average in North American cities is 30 per cent. And the city is doing well at being a tolerant society, a feature that attracts creative and productive people of diverse backgrounds.

But he said the creative cultural activities in Canada are not getting much of a “commercial bang” in the entertainment industry, one of the huge sectors of the new economy

Canada falling behind in global clean-tech boom

When Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt opened a recent industry conference by declaring Canada a global leader in clean-energy technology, the audience of about 250 people politely applauded.

Then, once the minister had left the building, a panel of industry experts took the stage and politely scolded the federal government for failing to make clean tech a strategic priority.

But then you read this!

China to supply turbines and funding for $1.5bn Texas wind farm

A Sino-US consortium yesterday announced plans for a US$1.5bn, 600MW wind farm in Texas, with China supplying all the turbines and most of the funding.

The 36,000-acre wind farm, set to be one of the largest in America, is a joint venture between state-backed Chinese firm Shenyang Power Group, US wind farm developer Cielo Wind Power and private equity firm US Renewable Energy Group.

Most of the funding for the project will come from Chinese banks, with loan guarantees and grants provided by the US federal government’s economic stimulus package, the consortium said.

But by now I am really confused with the above and now this from New Geography:

YES, MANUFACTURING MATTERS

Manufacturing employment has fallen below 12 million jobs for the first time since 1941, and manufacturing jobs as a percentage of total employment has fallen below 9%, the lowest level since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting data in 1939. But annual manufacturing output per worker is also at a record high: $223,915 (in constant 2000 dollars). That’s almost 3 times as much output per worker as in the early 1970s, and twice as much output per worker compared to the mid-1980s.

That has been the trend over the last 40 years: more output with fewer workers. That’s a good thing, or inevitable, or both – isn’t it? I used to think so; now I’m not so sure….

Have we in Windsor lost before we can start?

Reversing Industrial Decline
A recent report by the Lexington Institute spells out the depressing picture: After dominating global industrial activity for a century, the United States is losing its edge in manufacturing to other nations. Over the last 30 years, manufacturing has fallen from a quarter to an eighth of the domestic economy, while the share of manufactured goods consumed in America but produced by foreigners has risen from a tenth to a third. The decline of US manufacturing is reflected in record merchandise trade deficits, the loss of over 40,000 manufacturing jobs every month in the current decade, and the shrinking role of American producers in global industries such as electronics, steel, autos, chemicals and shipbuilding.