[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• 3 Quarks Daily's Omar Ali warns that ongoing violence against Shia in Pakistan threatens to destroy the country and destabilize the whole region.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about her week-long vacation in Nicaragua.


• blogTO shares vintage photos of Spadina Avenue.


• Centauri Dreams' notes that the surface of Titan's Ligeia Mare is apparently completely still.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to different papers, one suggesting that terrestrial planets orbiting red dwarfs are less likely to enter runaway ice ages, another further examining the concept of superhabitable worlds.


• Eastern Approaches takes a look at the continuing progress made by Poland's modernizing agricultural sector.


• Geocurrents examines the geopolitical complexities of Ukraine and its relationship with Russia.


• The New APPS Blog notes research suggesting that Internet trolls actually are problematic people in real life.


• The Transit Toronto Blog notes that a vintage streetcar will be giving free rides on Kingston Road on Saturday the 29th of this month.


• Torontoist provides an overview of the concept of co-op housing.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that, whatever else it was, the Russian conquest of Crimea was at least almost bloodless.


• Window on Eurasia warns of unrest among the Tatars of Tatarstan.

[URBAN NOTE] "What Kingston Road used to look like in Toronto"

blogTO's David Flack has a nice photo essay taking a look at the once motel-heavy Scarborough street of Kingston Road.

Kingston Road doesn't pose much of a challenge from an etymology standpoint. Once the easterly route from Toronto to Kingston, the road dates back to the outset of the 19th century when Asa Danforth was tasked with building a route linking Toronto with the Trent River. While Danforth's road made it all the way east, it never really took and fell into disrepair soon after completion. 15 years later, Kingston Road was built following mostly the same path. During the almost two centuries that have followed, Kingston Road made up a huge chunk of Highway 2, a route that still cuts across Southern Ontario even though it was removed from the official highway system in 1998.

Once served by a radial railway, Kingston Road has always been an important street in Toronto. Businesses capitalized on the travellers making their way to and from eastern destinations, which afforded the the Toronto portion of the street a rather vibrant retail scene earlier than other places to the east of downtown. It was also, rather naturally given its function, a place where some of Toronto's earliest tourist cabins were located.

The Kingston Road motel strip still clings to life today, but back in the 1950s it was positively booming. Prior to the 401, Highway 2 was a major east/west route through the province, and tourists were attracted to the cheap accommodation and proximity to the Scarborough Bluffs. These weren't rundown, shitty places. Take a look at the Roycroft Motel in the 1950s below. Now something of a concrete bunker, it's parking lot pool seems wonderfully optimistic and leisurely.

The whole strip of motels was, in fact, brimming with activity until the traffic dried up in the 1960s, thus mirroring the situation in the US with the rise of the Interstate. One suspects that the remaining motels will be gone in the next decade or so, depending on the level of condo pressure. The purge has already happened on Lake Shore, so that's not a particularly brave prediction to make.

[URBAN NOTE] "The end of an era"

NOW Toronto's Jessica Martin writes about the World's Biggest Bookstore. Now in its final week--it's actually closing on the 30th--it's going to be full of memories for many, many people.

Entrepreneur Jack Cole of the Coles bookstore chain opened the store in 1980 to join other landmarks in the area such as A&A Records and Sam the Record Man just around the corner on Yonge.

The flashy signs and iconic oversized discs gracing those storefronts are now gone, and the kitschy, seedy Yonge strip has been sanitized by chain retailers and Ryerson University’s expanding campus.

From the corner of Yonge and Edward, pedestrians looking west can still see the twinkling lights around the bright red letters: World’s Biggest Bookstore. It’s the only sign the store has ever had, and it’s past its prime: some bulbs are burned out, and parts of the B and O are missing.

[. . .]

Even now, a staff member is never more than a couple of shelves away. When a patron asks where to find something, employees answer with such familiarity it’s as if they’re guiding someone through their own home.

“It was a culture where they hired people who were really knowledgeable about books,” says long-time customer Karl Mamer.

For years, Mamer’s Saturday ritual included a visit to the store. With the rise of retailer websites such as Amazon, he doesn’t visit as often. “They are the victim of technology,” he says. “I think they are a relic of the past, but I’m not one who lives in the past.”

Mamer is right. The World’s Biggest is a monument to a bygone era, with its fluorescent lights, highlighter-yellow walls and the ever-present smell of printed paper. The looming end is apparent everywhere: cardboard boxes overflowing with books, red signs flagging what’s on clearance, and a large blue banner announcing the closing date along with addresses of nearby Indigo and Chapters locations.

[URBAN NOTE] "Eglinton Crosstown east tunneling to cause major traffic congestion"

Global News' David Shum shared the news that tunnelling on the Eglinton Crosstown line, that controversial light-rail component of Toronto's hoped-for mass transit system, is going to disrupt traffic on Eglinton Avenue east of Yonge for the next few years.

The underground tunneling project involves drilling a 3.25-kilometre section west to Yonge Street and is expected to last nearly three years.

Lanes along that portion of the Eglinton route will be reduced to one direction each side for the duration of the project.

The machines work in pairs and each are about 81 metres long, weighing 511,000 kilograms. They were given the nicknames Don and Humber representing the rivers nearby.

Traffic in the area will also be heavily congested as the walls are built for the underground stations at Laird, Bayview and Mt. Pleasant.

The Eglinton Crosstown light rail transit system is a 19-kilometre corridor that includes a 10-kilometre underground portion, between Keele Street and Laird Drive.

The Ontario government has invested $5.3 billion into the project which will be comprised of 25 stations linking 54 bus routes, three subway stations and various GO Transit lines.

Here's hoping it actually gets built!

[URBAN NOTE] "High-end shops in downtown Oakville closing doors"

The Toronto Star's Sam Grewal has an interesting report from the shopping districts of suburban Oakville west of Toronto. Relatively prosperous, the community's high-end shops are apparently going wanting for customers in the aftermath of the recession.

Inside downtown Oakville’s Second Chance consignment clothing store, described as “upscale resale,” the almost new Coach bag going for 85 bucks won’t be there for long.

It’s brisk business during the Saturday lunch hour, but around the corner, along Lakeshore Rd. (old Oakville’s main strip), the stores where some of the clothes inside Second Chance were originally bought are hurting.

“A lot of people with money, they’re not shopping here any more,” says Rita Hollis, owner of L.J. Shoes and Leather.

She works the counter at her own store. “It’s all the owners working inside the shops now. They never used to, but who can afford all the staff anymore?”

Gesturing around her empty store she rattles off the names of a half-dozen high-end retailers that used to draw business to her shop before they recently closed. “Garvey’s (Fine Men’s Wear) and Silkeborg were huge.”

Silkeborg, a high-end clothing, accessories and home interiors boutique, used to be located in a heritage building across the street. Now, above the papered windows, the sign is all that’s left. More than a dozen other storefronts along old Oakville’s once booming high street are also boarded up or feature “store closing” signs.

Higher rents and parking rates, as well as competition from outlet malls, online and cross-border shopping, are mentioned by struggling business owners. But the recent recession’s impact on Oakville’s affluent class is the theme they all turn to.

“They’re cashed out. We call it ‘maxed’,” says Greg McKinnon, owner of The Running Company. “They’re paying $2,000 a month for the Beamer and the Land Rover in the driveway, they have million-dollar mortgages and $50,000 in landscaping. There’s not a lot of money left over.”

[LINK] Two links on Chinese real estate investors in Detroit

Salon's Henry Grabar explored the potential benefits at length for American cities--including Detroit--of large-scale Chinese investment back in January in "How China could save Detroit."

Incumbent Mike Bell may have lost the Toledo, Ohio, mayoral election in November, but he departs this month with a kind of celebrity in urban development circles. His success in luring Chinese investment to Toledo, 50 miles south of Detroit on Lake Erie and with a population of 280,000, remains the envy of larger American cities. A Chinese university will soon set up a branch downtown; rare Chinese antiques will be shown at the Toledo museum this year. A waterfront redevelopment project is underway, courtesy of Chinese capital.

It’s a sign of things to come. The American real estate industry has finally tapped the faucets of global finance, and projects are swimming in Chinese capital. According to data from Real Capital Analytics, the Chinese spent $4.3 billion on commercial property in the United States in 2013, more than in the previous five years combined. The country is easily the fastest-growing source of foreign direct investment in the U.S., and Boston Consulting Group has predicted that Chinese offshore assets will double over the next three years.

“The trend for Chinese companies going abroad has just started,” Zhang Luliang, the chairman of state-owned Greenland Holding Group Co., said in October, shortly after his company agreed to buy a 70 percent stake in Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards project. That development, which will include 15 apartment buildings behind the 19,000-seat Barclay’s Center arena, is the biggest U.S. commercial real estate project yet to receive Chinese backing. But it is joined by similarly large deals in Oakland, Los Angeles and San Francisco. In the latter city, China’s Vanke Co. Ltd. agreed to partner on a $620 million apartment project with Tishman Speyer just 45 days after chairman Wang Shi saw it for the first time. Existing structures, like Manhattan’s GM Building, part of which was sold for $700 million to Soho China Ltd. this summer, have also proven popular.

Those projects have journalists and developers buzzing with excitement. And yet, they may represent as little as one third of what the Chinese are spending on U.S. property. The bulk of Chinese property investment is in residential real estate.

According to a survey by the National Association of Realtors, the Chinese spent more than $8 billion between March 2012 and March 2013 on U.S. homes, accounting for 12 percent of residential property sales to foreign buyers (up from 5 percent in 2009). They are now second only to Canadians among international buyers, having leapfrogged the U.K., India, Germany and Mexico in the past five years.

Writing somewhat earlier, Gordon Chang traced this flood of capital to Chinese insecurity about their country's future ("China's Newest City: We Call It 'Detroit'").

The Chinese are coming, but what are they doing? Dongdu International will make a big contribution to downtown by redeveloping the Detroit Free Press building, turning it into a retail and residential complex, but that ambitious plan appears to be the exception. China’s rich are investing in the Motor City like they invest in their own country, where they buy multiple units at a time. In China, like here, they often keep their acquisitions vacant, treating new properties like stores of value.

The Chinese buy-and-hold tactics in Detroit suggest patience, but that’s not the whole story. The bigger story is that the parking of wealth offshore indicates capital flight. The Chinese have only 13% of their wealth outside China, according to Oliver Williams of WealthInsight, while the global average is 20% to 30%, so some of transfers of wealth abroad are normal for a developing society.

But it’s not just money that is fleeing. A study conducted by Bank of China and Hurun found that more than half of China’s millionaires have taken steps to emigrate or are considering doing so. This statistic tells us the transfers of cash out of China are not just normal diversification.

There is substantial disagreement as to how much Chinese individuals have already stashed offshore. Boston Consulting Group estimates they hold $450 billion in assets outside their country, and WealthInsight believes the number to be $658 billion.

Yet everyone agrees that the figure, whatever it is, will go up fast. Boston Consulting, for instance, predicts offshore assets will double in three years. CNBC late last month called the movement of Chinese capital “one of the largest and most rapid wealth migrations of our time: hundreds of billions of dollars, and waves of millionaires flowing out of China to overseas destinations.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Eulogy for a Bookstore"

At Torontoist, John Lorinc remembers his days working at the Annex location of Book City, set to close this weekend.

Part-timers were expected to show up at about 4:45 p.m., arriving just in time to take the baton from the day crew. Stacks of books waiting to be shelved sat in piles on the floor next to the cash desk. In the cluttered basement would be several boxes of just-arrived remainders, ready to be hauled upstairs.

The manager, John Snyder, was typically pacing around the store, clutching a thick sheath of print-outs with the latest Penguin order. “Another day, another 50 cents,” he’d sigh, his voice full of mock exasperation.

I grew up during the golden age of Toronto bookstores. When my parents walked us downtown, we invariably made an extended pit stop at Britnell’s, the original Coles, at Yonge and Charles, or The Book Cellar, in Yorkville. On those visits, I would grab a thick picture book—Time Life Goes to the Movies!, or some such thing—and hide in a corner, flipping the pages.

So I leapt at the opportunity to work in a bookstore. The job, as any veteran will tell you, isn’t nearly as romantic as the literary image (see 84, Charing Cross Road, etc.). You get to know lots of books by their covers—I could identify hundreds of authors and titles, never having read any of them. You learn that customers can be annoying (a well-known literary critic came to the cash one day, wondering archly how we organized the fiction section) or outright dishonest (the surreptitious pocketing of merchandise in the stairwell).

The job involved a lot of tidying (to this day, I am unable to be in a bookstore without straightening the display tables) and a certain relentlessness: spring titles, fall titles, calendars. Repeat.