The average price of a new detached house in the Toronto region has risen a staggering 27 per cent, or $258,000, in the last year to an average of $1.24 million, according to the latest statistics released by Altus Data Solutions for the Building and Land Development Association (BILD).
Theclimb in pricesthat has become a regular feature of the new and resale residential real estate scene come as the supply of new builds hits a 16-year record low.
“If you look 10 years ago there were double the amount of new homes available to purchase in builder inventories than there were at the end of November,” said BILD vice-president Michelle Noble.
There were 15,184 new homes available in the Toronto region at the end of November, about half the 31,150 inventory at the same time in 2006.
Only 13 per cent of new homes on the market at the end of last month were low-rise homes, and, of the 2,036 low-rise units, only 789 were detached.
The TTC has confirmed it will not continue to update bus stop schedule information, citing cost savings and making use of new technology.
TTC spokesperson Stuart Green told Metroland Media Toronto the cash-strapped transit commission can save money from not having to print and install “thousands” of paper stop schedules as is required with regular route adjustments. Instead, Green suggested making use of one of many smartphone apps, which convey the TTC’s own open GPS data, to determine in real time when the bus is coming.
“Those without a smartphone can use the text function where available for next vehicle arrival and those without a cellphone at all could either use our website and trip planner,” said Green over email. "Or without any technology, they could always call TTC Customer Information at 416-393-4636 to get a schedule for that route on that day.”
That comes as little relief to Justin Van Dette, who recently organized a protest at the bus stop at the intersection of Woodbine Avenue and O’Connor Drive in early December, calling for the immediate replacement of the stop schedules for the 93 Woodbine route.
Several years ago, I taught briefly at an American university. It was one of those Very Nice Universities, populated mostly by lovely, bright students from private schools. They were mostly white and mostly from suburban, upper-middle-class families. In one course I had a student who, in an assignment on his family’s geography, told me a story of what he felt was an extraordinary coincidence: although he was from the northeast, he ran into a classmate on a summer holiday in a parking lot at the Grand Canyon. “What are the odds?” he asked.
Actually, they’re pretty good. Stay with me for a moment—this is relevant.
When we move through and across cities, provinces, and countries, our sense of the freedom of our movement is that we can go anywhere. There are few overt restrictions on the movement of Canadians, both within Canada and around the world.
That sense of “I can go wherever I want” can mask how routine and even determined our movements are. We don’t go anywhere and everywhere. Our movements are not random. We all have our own geographies, personal maps of the places that are meaningful for us.
If I asked you to draw a map of “your Toronto,” it would probably have your home in the middle, surrounded by key place markers of your daily life: work or school, family and friends, your regular places of leisure or other activities.
These anchor points reflect who we are. They also continue to shape us. Our geographies bring us into regular contact with people who have things in common with us. We tend to be in places where we’re with people who think the same, look the same, believe the same, think similarly, or like to do the same things. Not uniformly, but similarly.
None of this is negative; it is important to find and build communities within big cities. One of the key ways we do this is through places where we can connect along these lines.
And importantly, a lot of these encounters and gatherings with familiar people are not planned. We run into each other in the same places, because we have things in common that drive our interest or inclination to wind up in these spaces. It could be because we have similar incomes or similar interests in sports.
This year, eight pedestrians have been killed on, or adjacent to, the east-west artery, according to a Metro analysis. No other roadway’s tally comes close.
The trail of pedestrian deaths extends as far west as Dufferin Street, but the majority of fatalities along Eglinton occurred in the east, where the road widens to as many as six lanes.
The victims include 63-year-old Grace Fryfogel, killed Oct. 20 at Eglinton and Hanna Road, as well as a construction worker run down Oct. 12 near Midland Avenue and an 81-year-old man on a mobility scooter, killed Oct. 5 at Eglinton and Winter Avenue.
The stats didn’t come as a surprise to residents who don’t believe the city is doing enough to address the problem.
The city’s new road safety plan largely ignores Eglinton. Save for a small portion in Etobicoke, speed limits on the road remain untouched, and it’s not included in the city’s list of pedestrian safety corridors, most of which are located downtown.
San Francisco is one of the most progressive cities in the nation, especially when it comes to national immigration. We believe so much in the natural right of people to join us here in America that we fought to keep our status as sanctuary city even in the face of being federally defunded for it. We pride ourselves on our rejection of plans to tighten immigration controls and deport undocumented immigrants. Yet take that same conversation to the local level and all bets are off. City meetings have become heated, divisive and prone to rhetoric where we openly discuss exactly which kinds of people we want to keep out of our city.
This is an ethically incoherent position. If we in San Francisco so strongly believe that national immigration is a human right, then it seems strange to block migration into our own neighborhoods.
Consider the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ decision to challenge the environmental review of a proposed housing project at 1515 Van Ness Ave. Despite the project’s plan to rent 25 percent of its units at a below-market rate, many members of the neighborhood preservation group, Calle 24, expressed anger that the project might bring tech workers into the Latino Cultural District.
Or that members of the Forest Hill homeowners association opposed a project that would build affordable housing for seniors and the formerly homeless on a site now occupied by a church. One of the grievances aired was that it might bring mentally unstable or drug-addicted people into the neighborhood.
As British Columbia plans to roll out interest-free loans to thousands of people seeking to buy their first home, the Peel Region in Ontario is suspending a similar loan program so it can instead use the resources for much-needed social housing.
Last week, B.C. Premier Christy Clark announced her government would soon start offering interest-free loans to help first-time home buyers with their down payments in a market where skyrocketing real estate has priced many out of owning property in and around Metro Vancouver.
Under the program, the B.C. government will match down payments of up to $37,500 made by first-time buyers purchasing any home priced up to $750,000. These applicants can get only the 25-year loans – which are free of interest for the first five years – if they commit to living in the unit for those initial five years.
Critics panned the move as heaping additional risk on young families while stoking property prices at a time when Ottawa is warning of abnormally high household debt and introducing measures to cool the frothy housing sector.
In Peel, where more than a million people live in the communities of Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon, the regional government says a similar program of loans was successful in helping 681 renting households become owners over the past eight years. Those wanting to buy a property priced up to $330,000 can have a loan of up to $20,000 for a down payment. That debt is forgiven if they make that home their principal residence for the next 20 years.
Beth Storti, the manager who oversees Peel Region’s loan program, said there was not enough funding in recent years to meet demand from aspiring homeowners.
“Last year was a very, very busy year for us,” she said.
An ancient wetland-gardening site unearthed during a road-building project in British Columbia is as culturally important as any other wonder of the world, says a member of the indigenous group who directed the excavation project.
A study published Wednesday found that as early as 1,800 BC, ancestors of the Katzie First Nation in B.C.’s Lower Mainland were engineering the wetland environment to increase the yield of a valuable, semi-aquatic plant known as a wapato. The report describes the finding as the first direct archeological evidence of the cultivation of wild plants in the Pacific Northwest.
“This is as important to us as the Egyptian pyramids, or the temples in Thailand, or Machu Picchu,” said Debbie Miller, who works with an archeological consulting firm owned by the Katzie Nation.
Road-building crews uncovered a rock platform measuring about 12-square metres made up of flat stones that would have rested several feet underwater four millenniums ago. The distribution of the stones into a pattern of single and double layers, as well as their closely packed arrangement, suggests they were placed deliberately, the study published online in ScienceAdvances found.
The stone “pavement” would have prevented the wapato from penetrating deep into the sludgy, wetland sediment, making it easier for gatherers to use long, sharpened digging tools to locate the buried plant and cut it free.
[W]hile some research has cast doubt on the possibility that Proxima b could indeed support life, a new research study offers a more positive picture. The research comes from the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS) in Seattle, Washington, where astrobiologist Dimitra Atri has conducted simulations that show that Proxima b could indeed be habitable, assuming certain prerequisites were met.
Dr. Atri is a computational physicist whose work with the BMSIS includes the impacts of antiparticles and radiation on biological systems. For the sake of his study – “Modelling stellar proton event-induced particle radiation dose on close-in exoplanets“, which appeared recently in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters – he conducted simulations to measure the impact stellar flares from its sun would have on Proxima b.
To put this perspective, it is important to note how the Kepler mission has found a plethora of planets orbiting red dwarf stars in recent years, many of which are believed to be “Earth-like” and are close enough to their suns to have liquid water on their surfaces. However, red dwarfs have a number of issues that do not bode well for habitability, which include their variable nature and the fact they are cooler and fainter than other classes of stars.
This means that any planet close enough to orbit within a red dwarf’s habitable zone would be subject to powerful solar flares – aka. Stellar Proton Events (SPEs) – and would likely be tidally-locked with the star. In other words, only one side would be getting the light and heat necessary to support life, but it would be exposed to a lot of solar protons, which would interact with its atmosphere to create harmful radiation.
As such, the astronomical community is interested in what kinds of conditions are there for planets like Proxima b so they might know if life has (or had) a shot of evolving there. For the sake of his study, Dr. Atri conducted a series of probability (aka. Monte Carlo) simulations that took into account three factors – the type and size of stellar flares, various thicknesses of the planet’s atmosphere and the strength of its magnetic field.
[. . .] Atri found that the existence of a strong magnetic field, which would also ensure that the planet has a viable atmosphere, would lead survivable conditions. While the planet would still experience a spike in radiation whenever a superflare took place, life could survive on a planet like Proxima b in the long run. On the other hand, a weak atmosphere or magnetic field would foretell doom.
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