[PHOTO] Five photos of downtown Charlottetown, summer 2016

Charlottetown City Hall remains as imposing as ever.



This low-strung commercial strip, on Queen Street just south of City Hall, is about as urban as the Island gets.



Myron's was an anchor of Island nightlife, but alas! it is gone.



The Dominion Building, on Queen at Richmond, is perhaps the Island's chief example of brutalism in architecture.



Despite the shift of commerce to the periphery of Charlottetown, the Confederation Court Mall remains.

[PHOTO] Seen from the fifth floor of the Toronto Reference Library

Standing yesterday on the fifth floor of the Toronto Reference Library, I decided to take advantage of the view. The view north, into wooded Rosedale, was only partly blocked by condos. The view south, into Yorkville, was entirely urban.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Dangerous Minds notes a remarkable Japanese magazine featuring photos of rock stars from the 1970s and 1980s.


• Joe. My. God. notes the death of drag legend Lady Chablis.


• Marginal Revolution notes the exceptional skepticism of some with the idea of a guaranteed minimum income in Kenya.


• The NYRB Daily interviews Chinese documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming, who despairs for the future of civil society in her country.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer contrasts race and politics in the states of Alabama and Mississippi.


• Registan notes the orderly succession of power in post-Karimov Uzbekistan.


• Torontoist notes that the TTC can be a nightmare for women.

[URBAN NOTE] "Is Canada Really Sitting on a Real Estate Bubble That’s About to Burst?"

Vice's Sarah Berman notes that Vancouver is not equivalent to all of Canada.

For those of us living in Vancouver, this has been an easy enough narrative to swallow. Housing has been horribly expensive for years now, and the last six months have broken all kinds of records for insane prices and unprecedented sales, not to mention rising eviction complaints. But even as banks pump out new studies that say affordability in Vancouver is the worst it's ever been, there are plenty of reasons to ignore the Lehman bro. That he has an obvious vested interest in a crash, and his former employer was super-duper wrong that one time, is only part of it. The bottom line is: Vancouver ≠ Canada.

To get a better handle on all this bubble talk, I called up Robert Hogue, senior economist at RBC Economic Research and coauthor of a study released yesterday that confirmed housing affordability in Vancouver is in the actual worst in the country. The bank measured this by comparing median incomes to average "homeownership costs" including mortgage payments, utilities and taxes.

Hogue says Vancouver had its biggest drop in affordability since they started measuring this stuff over the first two quarters of 2016. Right now housing costs sit at 90.3 percent of what a Vancouverite earns before taxes. That's an 18.3 percent drop in affordability over this time last year. (Ownership costs for single-detached homes are an even more ridiculous 126.8 percent of median incomes).

"I think the numbers speak for themselves," Hogue told VICE. "This clearly puts significant pressure on affordability that was already stretched to begin with."

But just because Vancouver's prices have shot up an unsustainable 30 percent in a year, doesn't mean the whole country's housing market is about to come down. By Hogue's account, Vancouver is an outlier when you look at the country as a whole. "We're really only talking about two markets, Toronto and particularly Vancouver, where affordability is deteriorating—not only deteriorating, but at an accelerating pace," he told VICE. "Elsewhere the vast majority of markets are balanced and not an issue."

On the list of least affordable cities, Toronto is second at 60.2 percent, followed by Victoria at 51.4 percent. The rest of Canada is holding stable well below the country's 42.8 percent average. "Most markets across Canada are pretty much within historical norms," he said.

[URBAN NOTE] "Metro Vancouver report makes case for more rental units near transit"

The Globe and Mail features Frances Bula's article. Frankly, I'm unsurprised by it.

The region can tackle two big, expensive problems at once by making sure that low-income renters get some of the space when development happens around transit stations, says a report from Metro Vancouver.

That’s because renters, even when they have the same household income as condo owners, are more likely to take transit, according to new data analysis that looked for the first time at the differences between owners and renters.

The report concludes there’s a triple benefit: Having renters close to transit lines ensures that those lines get high ridership. Giving them easy access to transit gives those residents a boost when it comes to being able to get to jobs and schools.

“Finally, these transit customers may benefit from a resultant reduced overall housing and transportation cost burden relative to their income levels,” said the report. That reduces the need for other provincial programs to help them out.

The difference is especially true for low-income renters, who are twice as likely to take transit as low-income homeowners.

[URBAN NOTE] "Who’s Really Using Moss Park?"

Torontoist's Beatrice Paez profiles a remarkable photo project in Moss Park.

Yasin Osman is no stranger to witnessing a neighbourhood in transition. The 20-something first dabbled in photography by documenting the subtle changes in Regent Park. With his mother’s cellphone, he focused on the smallest details—a windowless frame, a disappearing door. Taken together, those negligible details dramatically alter a landscape, once the dilapidated buildings are torn down.

This time, however, Osman wants to bring into focus the lighter, more joyous side of changing Moss Park that Torontonians don’t always get a glimpse of. “Moss Park doesn’t necessarily have the greatest reputation,” he says. “Sometimes people forget that there are people in these places who are happy.”

Osman was among eight artists recruited by The 519 LGBTQ community centre and the City of Toronto for the Moss Park Portrait Project. Local artists were dispatched around the park and its surrounding streets to capture everyday life in the area over the course of 17 hours.

The portraits will eventually be displayed chronologically, to show who visits and uses the park throughout the day.

The event, held on August 27, was part of The 519 and the City’s latest round of public consultations over the fate of the John Innes Community Recreation Centre. It’s touted as an effort to capture the community’s mood and gather feedback on the proposal. With an estimated $85 to $100 million at stake, the proposed plan is to reconstruct the centre, which is situated on park grounds, and to transform its wider surroundings.

I'll look forward to seeing these photos once the exhibit is up.

[URBAN NOTE] "One Toronto neighbourhood wants to get rid of its Tim Hortons"

blogTO reports on trouble down in The Beaches.

The Beaches might one of Toronto's most idyllic neighbourhoods, but there's trouble brewing by the water. That's because some residents are unhappy with the chain restaurants at 1681 Lake Shore Blvd. E., in Woodbine Park.

Local company Tuggs Inc., currently has a 20 year lease on the boardwalk properties (it used to run the Boardwalk Cafe) as well as at other neighbourhood spots, including concessions at Kew Gardens and the Donald D. Summerville Pool.

As the Toronto Star writes, Tuggs got its long lease in order to keep mom-and-pop shops by the beach. Yet a Carters Landing (an establishment owned by restaurant giant Cara Operations Limited) and a Tim Hortons have since moved in.

Now, Tuggs is trying to a reassign a portion of its lease to Cara. City Council will debate this item, likely at its October 5 meeting.

[URBAN NOTE] "Airbnb’s Toronto data is a confusing mess"

At MacLean's, Colin Horgan finds issue with the statistics provided by Airbnb.

On the surface, Airbnb’s new figures work to downplay the perception that its rentals are swallowing housing stock. The company points out that “out of 5.3 million total housing units in Ontario as of the year 2011, only 500 homes are listed for 270 days or more per year with Airbnb.” And in keeping with its recent marketing push (featuring billboards prominently displayed in downtown Toronto and, now, host testimonial ads in Vancouver), Airbnb states that Ontario hosts “earn modest, but significant, amounts of supplemental income from hosting,” and are “everyday people trying to pay the bills.” Additionally, the report states that “the vast majority of Airbnb’s Ontario hosts share their primary residence.”

Unsurprisingly, the majority of Airbnb’s 15,000 Ontario hosts are in Toronto; the city is home to 8,600 of them. Like Vancouver, Toronto is going through a stiff real estate squeeze, with average house prices hitting a new high in August. Airbnb explains its impact on housing, by stating that “almost 90 per cent of hosts have just one entire home listing,” and that 39 per cent of listings are “operated by hosts renting between one and 30 nights per year.”

However, other figures hint that there are potentially many listings in Toronto operated by a small number of people, but it’s difficult to ascertain what that number may be. For all its talk of transparency, Airbnb’s data report does not make that—or much else—easy to figure it out.

For instance, the report states that two per cent of Airbnb’s 8,600 Toronto hosts—just 172 hosts—had five or more whole home listings, which accounted for 13 per cent of all listings in the city in June 2016. But Airbnb doesn’t make it easy to contextualize that latter figure, because the report doesn’t list the total number of whole home listings available in the city during the same period—it just gives the percentage.

Maclean’s asked Airbnb to provide the total number of listings for June. The company did not. Instead, Alex Dagg, policy lead for Airbnb in Canada provided a statement that the numbers in the report, “in our opinion represent a transparent view of the current market, which is constantly changing.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Basra, Dystopian City"

Middle East Online hosts Peter Harling's article, originally published in Le Monde diplomatique, about the decline of Iraq's Basra.

Basra, the second or third largest city in Iraq, should be a great metropolis, more dynamic than Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha or Kuwait City, and should dominate the Gulf. Its port, Umm Qasr, offers the rest of the world access to one of the biggest oil-producing countries, which is also a huge potential consumer market. Hydrocarbons are abundant in the area, and the deposits are cheap to exploit, giving substantial profit margins no matter how much the price of oil varies.

Not so long ago, Basra was known for its cosmopolitan society, intellectual elite and skilled workforce — a real city that should have become a manufacturing power and a platform for regional trade. Its fertile hinterland is suited to rice and dates, for which it was once famed. Yet now, when you arrive at the airport, the first thing you see is a banner reading ‘Basra: Investment Paradise’ and all you can do is laugh, and despair.

Basra feels like a third-world dystopia. The state is almost absent, except as a governorate, which complains that it has not had a budget since 2013. Week after week, it is surrounded by demonstrators who never stop protesting, though they don’t attract much popular support. The spread of sectarian militias has almost eclipsed the presence of the official security forces. The foreign oil companies are also invisible: At best, they recruit manual labour locally, when some tribe or other resorts to violence to ensure that it receives a share of the oil money.

The economy is shifting rapidly from dependence on sectors that are already fairly doubtful — such as public funding (when salaries are actually paid and projects financed) and consumption of imported goods (especially cars) — towards the morbid reality of endemic corruption and trafficking in hydrocarbons and drugs. Meanwhile a continuing demographic explosion has led to uncontrolled urban development.

Basra is the exact opposite of a city-state — that ancient model of autonomous, resource-rich cities that seems to reappear when the nation-state disintegrates. Those who make the law here are outsiders. The governorate is subordinate to a hyper-centralised system: Even trivial decisions are taken in Baghdad, where Basra has few to speak for it — just one minister out of 30 and 9% of seats in parliament. The local political class represents non-indigenous parties and militias, which have a parasitic relationship to the city.

[OBSCURA] On satellite evidence of rapid global warming in the oceans

Google+ David David Belliveau posted, from the website of the National Weather Service's Environmental Modelling Centre, a rather disturbing map showing anomalous sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic.



This is bad, isn't it?