[PHOTO] Province House wrapped up in Charlottetown

While it is closed for expensive affairs, Charlottetown's Province House is literally wrapped up by this banner advertising the building's role in Canadian history. If it was any more tightly wrapped, one might think Christo had come by.

[PHOTO] Summit of Aura, Toronto

The summit of Toronto's Aura tower at College Park is lofty indeed.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• blogTO notes how expensive Toronto's rental market is.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanet system.


• Crooked Timber engages with the complexities of racism.


• The Crux shares some oral history about the detection of the first gravitational wave.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports about the difficulties involved with detecting exoplanets around red dwarfs and describes the discovery of a super-Earth orbiting an orange dwarf in the Pleiades.


• Joe. My. God. notes that New York City ended free web browsing at browsing stations because people kept looking up porn.


• Language Log notes that a partially shared script does not make Chinese readable by speakers of Japanese, and vice versa.


• Marginal Revolution cautions against the idea that Brexit is over.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer talks about the usefulness of counterfactuals, especially good counterfactuals.


• Torontoist argues that the TTC needs more cats. Why not?


• The Volokh Conspiracy links to a comparative global study of settlements in occupied territories.


• Window on Eurasia reports that Google has displaced television as a primary source of news for Russians.

[URBAN NOTE] "Carefully constructed wetland unveiled in Tommy Thompson Park"

The Toronto Star's Jesse Winter describes a park development I would like to see.

On Mayor John Tory’s watch, Toronto is going to the birds … and the frogs, turtles, butterflies, and rabbits.

On Wednesday a flock of wild politicians unveiled Cell 2, the second phase of a constructed coastal wetland project on the Leslie Street Spit.

The area spans 9.3 hectares on the spit, providing marshy home for rare birds, endangered turtles, fish, rabbits, insects and other animals in the shadow of the CN Tower.

As senior restoration manager Ralph Toninger explained, the whole area was carefully designed and purpose-built for the animals. Every log and rock in the wetland’s ponds was placed by hand.

“A project like this doesn’t arise easily,” Toninger said. “It’s been 10 years in the making.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto reimagines the public park for the 21st century"

blogTO's Derek Flack notes how the design of parks is taking off in Toronto.

In a city that seems always in a state of becoming something great, the design of new buildings is important stuff.

A similar rebirth is now taking shape with Toronto's park spaces. Gone are the days when an outdoor space is conceived as a grassy expansive with a few benches and a playground. As the city has become more and more dense, the design of its parks has become more and more inventive.

This process can probably be traced back to Claude Cormier's HTO Park, which repurposed industrial lands as an urban beach and served as an important precursor to the widely loved Sugar Beach, the latter of which almost entirely dispenses with the use of grass.

Working with smaller sites has forced architects and landscape designers to move away from traditional models of parkland in favour of urban spaces that are high on usability rather than sheer open area. Perhaps the best example of such a project is Underpass Park, but the design principles seen there can be spotted in most new spaces, even those with far more greenery.

Take, for example, the award-winning Corktown Common. Instead of plopping down a huge field in the middle of a major residential development, the park is built atop the Flood Protection Landform for the Canary District, and thus features plenty topographic variety to go along with a wetland pond, boardwalk path, splash pad and modern playground.

[URBAN NOTE] "French Castles Cheaper to Rent Than San Francisco Apartments"

NBC Bay Area's Tamara Palmer looks at real estate prices in San Francisco in a rather enlightening international perspective. San Francisco is no longer going to be a place where non-rich people live, right?

Ready to trade that San Francisco studio apartment for a French castle?

Zumper located a seven bedroom castle on 200 acres of land in Ringuette, Region Aquitaine, France renting for $2,925 per month and contrasted it against a current listing for a 401 square-foot studio apartment on Page Street in San Francisco's Lower Haight, which goes for $3,000 per month.

Another six bedroom castle in France is currently on the rental market for $4,940 per month and includes a pool, three acre garden and "several lawns." It's juxtaposed against a Laurel Heights three bedroom apartment on Collins Street that runs $4,995. No square footage is mentioned, and one of the bedrooms doesn't have a closet.

[URBAN NOTE] "The hidden pockets in Toronto where gentrification is really happening"

Robin Levinson King at the Toronto Star looks at where gentrification is, and is not, happening in Toronto. It's present in Toronto generally, but it's intense in only a few areas.

At the corner of Morse St. and Queen St. E. in Leslieville, the signifiers of gentrification are on full display at Mercury Espresso Bar — a man with an artfully trimmed beard reads the paper while Kate Bush music plays cloyingly in the background, drowned out by the hiss and whistle of the espresso machine.

“I am the eye of the storm, I am the gentrification,” jokes barista Tyler Semrick-Palmateer as he makes a perfectly crafted Americano.

Semrick-Palmateer, the barista, is himself a bit of a hybrid gentrifier — he works in Leslieville and lives at Clinton and Harbord Sts., another bastion of Toronto’s affluent hipsterism. But the 30-something musician also grew up not far from the café, on Broadview Ave., and remembers the neighbourhood’s less shiny past.

A block away from the café in Leslieville, Jim’s Restaurant, a classic family restaurant famous for its Western sandwiches, is boarded up to make room for a six-storey condominium.

“It’s a vastly different place,” Semrick-Palmateer said. “I don’t know what it will be replaced with, probably not some old-school … diner. Probably some sort of specialty vapour shop.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto leads Vancouver in luxury home market"

The Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski reports about Toronto's real estate issues.

Bridle Path estates, Rosedale palaces and Forest Hill piles are outselling Vancouver’s famously expensive high-end mountain and oceanfront views, says luxury realtor Sotheby’s International Realty Canada.

Toronto’s lead in Canadian luxury home sales continued through the summer and is expected to carry on for the remainder of 2016, says the company’s fall forecast, published Wednesday.

Sales of $1-million-plus Toronto-area single-family homes rose 83 per cent year over year in July and August. That’s 3,026 homes, with 55 per cent of them inside Toronto’s borders. Meanwhile, Vancouver saw a decline of 30 per cent in July and 65 per cent in August, for a total of 288 sales of $1-million-plus homes.

That’s not entirely surprising given that the average cost of a detached home in Toronto was about $1.2 million, said Sotheby’s CEO Brad Henderson.

“While $1 million is still a considerable amount of money, it’s difficult to find a single-family home in the city of Toronto for less than $1 million and it is not uncommon to find homes in the $2-million, $3-million or even $4-million-plus range,” he said.

[URBAN NOTE] "Housing affordability, not hydro bills, is what’s really hurting Ontario"

I agree entirely with John Lorinc's Spacing Toronto article.

[A]ffordable housing didn’t warrant a single mention in Monday’s throne speech, which is astonishing for a government that presents itself as progressive-minded.

The reality is that this issue scarcely registers on the Liberals’ radar. Evidence? In 2014, when Wynne delivered her first Throne Speech, she pledged a continuation of the Investment in Affordable Housing Program (IAHP), a cost-shared venture with the feds. The amount to be spent: $800 million between 2015 and 2020 (the feds anted up another $400 million). In other words, $200 million annually, or a fifth of this latest shell game measure with hydro bills.

Which one gets the most bang for the buck? The politics of hydro bills are well known, and the premier has her eye on 2018. But according to the province’s own evaluation of the program’s results from 2011 to 2015, the IAHP moved over 15,000 households out of housing need, provided housing vouchers for others, and financed the creation or protection of thousands of rental or assisted units.

It was clearly a successful endeavour, and one that provides dividends: when families or individuals aren’t sinking most of their monthly income into rent, they spend and save more.

Indeed, if the Wynne government had chosen to use that $1 billion needed to finance the hydro cut to expand IAHP, it would have doubled down on these gains in the living standards of tens of thousands of lower-income Ontarians.