[PHOTO] Looking forward

One advantage of the old boxy T-series car over the new streamlined Toronto Rocket is that you can look out through the front of the lead car.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster notes the theories that planets orbiting younger stars, on account of their greater abundances of heavy elements, will be warmer than older planets like Earth, extending habitable zones deeper into planetary systems than previously believed.


• Daniel Drezner is unimpressed by American skills at empire-building; even the surfeit of Americans involved in the reconstruction of Kosovo arguably plays to the Kosovars' benefit more than to the United States.


• Will Baird at The Dragon's Tale notes that a recent Australian study of fossils of multicellular fossils from more than a half-billion years ago, the Ediacaran age, aren't ancestral to modern land-dwellers.


• The Global Sociology Blog notes the ways in which privilege can couch itself as neutrality, i.e. heterosexuality as normal and queerness as not.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money broke for me the news that the Syrian government is using Scud missiles against rebels, inaccurate though they may be. Is this a sign of desperation?


• Marginal Revolution notes that educated East Asian women tend not to marry, perhaps reflecting the choice forced on them between careers and traditional families.


• At Open the Future, Jamais Cascio considers the ethical questions connected with sexbots.


• The Population Reference Blog notes the changing American population: aging, slower-growing, more diverse.


• Torontoist reports on a forum in Toronto on the need to repair high-rise apartment towers.


• The Volokh Conspiracy shares the old argument that the commercial exploitation of resources in space requires private property rights, first.


• Window on Eurasia notes that at least economically, China is replacing Russia as a partner for post-Soviet Central Asia.

[URBAN NOTE] "Cities With Denser Cores Do Better"

Writing at The Atlantic Cities, urban guru Richard Florida crunches data and comes up with an argument supporting high-density urban areas (implicitly, against lower-density sprawl and exurban conurbations).

Most studies of the effects of density measure it rather crudely, as I noted recently, and simply average out the number of people per unit of land area. By this standard measure, Los Angeles is denser than New York. But density is far, far more concentrated in the center of Manhattan than anywhere in L.A.

That raises a big question: Do cities with more concentrated density — where people and economic activity are concentrated and spiky near the center — see even better economic performance?

Recent data from the U.S. Census enable us to take a look, providing a measure of density that is based on the actual distribution of people within and across cities and metro areas. This measure of 'population-weighted density' is based on the average density of the small local areas — the Census tracts — that comprise metros. The Census Bureau also measures the density of cities and metros at the one-mile and five-mile radii of the city center.

With the help of my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander, I looked at how these different types of density are associated with a wide range of regional economic outcomes. Mellander ran simple correlations between these density measures and variables like regional income, wages, economic output, college grads, the creative class, high tech industry, home prices, commuting patterns, and even happiness. The table below summarizes the key results. As usual, I note that correlation does not equal causation. Still, the findings are interesting and help shed light on the role of density — and especially cities where population is more densely concentrated in and around their cores — on regional economic development.

The first thing one notices is that metros which rank highly on the average measure of density — those that average a lot of people per square mile — are not necessarily those where people and economic activity are most concentrated near the center, as the scatter-graph below shows. While average density and population-weighted density are correlated (.46), they are clearly not the same thing.

Not surprisingly, large metros are the ones that tend to have density more concentrated near their cores. The correlation between population-weighted density and population is .64.

Ever since Jane Jacobs, urban thinkers and economists have argued that clusters of talented and ambitious people increase one another’s productivity and the productivity of the broader community, spurring economic growth. So, what about economic growth: Is it higher in metros where density is more concentrated? The short answer is yes.

Economic growth and development, according to several key measures, is higher in metros that are not just dense, but where density is more concentrated. This is true for productivity, measured as economic output per person, as well as both income and wages.

Talent levels are also higher where density is more concentrated. This holds for both the share of college grads and the share of knowledge, professional, and creative workers. Conversely, working class jobs are more likely to be found in metros that are less densely concentrated.

Thoughts?

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto’s Empress Hotel fire: Serial arsonist jailed 10 years"

This is very sad.

A mentally retarded serial arsonist who torched his own apartment building and caused a six-alarm fire at Toronto’s historic former Empress Hotel, hoping people would get hurt or die, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Stewart Poirier, 53, bent over and grimaced when provincial court Justice Rebecca Rutherford imposed sentence, although it was precisely the term his lawyer, Dana Garrick, had requested.

Crown prosecutor Michael Callaghan had called for 12 years.

The homeless substance abuser has no insight into his anti-social, dangerous behavior, the judge said.

“The circumstances of Mr. Poirier’s life are sad and tragic,” she said. “It’s hard not to feel sympathy for Mr. Poirier … an impulse-ridden man with the brain of a boy.”

He spent his childhood institutionalized at Ontario Hospital in Smiths Falls, where he reports he was continually abused, both physically and sexually. The illiterate some-time male prostitute has been in and out of jail much of his life.

In October he pleaded guilty to attempted murder, threatening death and four counts of arson.

“It’s hard to believe such a sad and tragic man can do such damage,” Rutherford said.

Shortly after midnight on Jan. 3, 2011, he walked through an insecure gate into 335 Yonge St., the empty, historically designated former Empress Hotel, built in 1888, doused a wood pile on the third floor with gas and ignited it.

The resulting fire took 125 firefighters to extinguish. Two were injured when they lost their footing. Neither has fully recovered emotionally, court heard. Damages were over $3 million.

[URBAN NOTE] "Ontario’s Auditor General Thinks the Union-Pearson Rail Link May Be a Money Loser"

This news (reported by Torontoist's Steve Kupferman) about the financial viability, or not, of the Union-Pearson Express intended to connect Union Station in downtown Toronto with Pearson International Airport on the border with Mississauga in less than a half-hour, is an obvious issue for GTA transit.

A planned railway between Union Station and Pearson airport has little hope of breaking even on its expenses unless it charges almost $30 per one-way ride. This according to a section of an annual report from the office of the auditor general of Ontario, which was released earlier today.

The Union Pearson Express—until recently known as the Union-Pearson Air-Rail Link—is a project that’s being spearheaded by Metrolinx. A slick new promotional website for the forthcoming rail line promises all sorts of tantalizing conveniences: trains every 15 minutes! A 25-minute ride!

If this sounds a whole lot better than the typical hour-long TTC ride to Pearson from downtown, well, it certainly should be. Metrolinx is aiming to have the whole thing open in spring 2015, in time for Toronto’s Pan American games.

But it won’t be as cheap as that TTC ride. The UP Express was always conceived of as a premium service. Over the years, transportation officials have hinted that tickets would be in the $20 range. But this latest auditor general’s report raises the possibility that even a relatively hefty fee like that may not be enough to prevent the line from losing money. Metrolinx has yet to finalize the line’s ticket prices.

The report points out that Metrolinx is expecting to hit three million riders after three years of operation. Based on those numbers, the auditor general thinks the agency would have to charge $28 for a one-way ticket, just to break even in the first year.

Suddenly, paying the cost of a token for an hour-long TTC ride to Pearson doesn’t seem like such a bad deal, does it? Unless the UP Express can somehow manage to be 10 times as good as public transit, its whole value proposition becomes questionable.

And it gets even more worrisome. The auditor general also points out that Metrolinx’s ridership numbers could be overly optimistic. That’s because there’s reason to expect that Torontonians might be turned off by the line’s high ticket prices.

[LINK] "For Scalia, no gay people, just gay sex?"

Any number of people have linked to Michael McGough's Los Angeles Times piece arguing that notoriously homophobic US Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia grounds his homophobia in the belief that homosexuality isn't an identity but rather an aggregate of individual sexual acts which can themselves be detested.

The quotations from Scalia opinions that so dismayed Princeton freshman Duncan Hosie all referred to homosexual conduct. For example, in a 1996 case the majority of the court held that voters in Colorado had exhibited “animus” toward gays by making it impossible for the state or municipalities to pass laws protecting them from discrimination. Scalia responded: “I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible — murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals — and could exhibit even 'animus' toward such conduct." In his dissent Scalia did refer to “homosexuals” (he assiduously avoided the word “gay” except in quoted material), but he used that term interchangeably with “those who engage in homosexual conduct.”

And what of the notion of "sexual orientation"? Scalia did acknowledge in his Colorado opinion that such a thing might exist. For example, he wrote that it was permissible for states to criminalize homosexual conduct (as it was in 1996) "surely it is rational to deny special favor and protection to those with a self avowed tendency or desire to engage in the conduct. In the next sentence he suggests that "'homosexual-orientation' is an acceptable stand-in for homosexual conduct."

The notion that there are no homosexual people, just homosexual acts, is an ancient one. Until recently it was the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church. Scalia’s son Paul, a Catholic priest who has served as chaplain to Courage – “a spiritual support group to help those with same-sex attractions live chaste lives” – continues to resist the idea of a gay identity. He has written: “We must always distinguish the person from the attractions. Most errors in this area come from the reduction of the person to the attractions: to say, ‘A person who has homosexual attractions must be homosexual.’ This reduces the human person to the sum total of his sexual inclinations.”

[. . .]

Contrast the Scalias’ approach to this passage in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in the 2003 case of Lawrence vs. Texas, which overturned a Texas law against same-sex sodomy. Kennedy wrote: “The case does involve two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other, engaged in sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle. The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.” Some gay activists blanched at Kennedy’s use of the term “homosexual lifestyle,” but applauded his larger point: that what was at issue was the lives of gays and lesbians, not isolated sexual acts.

[. . .]

The conventional interpretation of Scalia’s opinions in gay-rights cases is that he doesn’t like gays; but maybe the more accurate gloss is that he doesn’t believe they exist -- except when they are engaging in (or thinking about) "immoral and unacceptable" sexual acts.