The New Brunswick government will add 12 charging stations to parks and tourist attractions in a province where, as of last September, fewer than 100 electric cars are registered.
But the provincial government says it wants to be ready for an expected increase in electric vehicles. The utility hopes the chargers will encourage drivers to shift to electric. In a news release on Tuesday, the Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture said it will add standard level-2 electric charging stations at:
NB Power is using these three charging stations in Fredericton for research in energy efficiency. (Redmond Shannon/CBC) The utility indicated earlier that it would add more charging stations this year under a $3 million program. "The province is the fastest-growing electric vehicle market in the country, with a 124 per cent year-over-year increase," read Tuesday's statement. But in April, reports submitted to the Energy and Utilities Board revealed that several charging stations were only used one hour a week in December 2017. Kings Landing, opened in 1974, will be one of the parks to receive an electric charging station. (Jordan Gill/CBC) But the utility said it believed adding more charging stations would encourage more electric vehicle sales. Shelia Legace, a spokesperson for NB Power, said a network of charging stations reduces "range anxiety" for drivers of electric vehicles. "Therefore, encouraging more people to adopt electric vehicles." Of the 95 or so electric vehicles registered in the province, NB Power owns 26 and the rest are owned by a variety of private organizations. Environment Minister Andrew Harvey said the charging stations are a response to demand and will help support a cleaner economy. "Installing charging stations at our provincial parks and attractions ensures our government is meeting the increased demand for cleaner transportation methods for our tourists and residents," he said. Parlee Beach Provincial Park, one of the province's most popular tourist draws, will also get a station. (Paul Hantiuk/CBC) NB Power said it needs to be prepared for increased use of electric vehicles. "NB Power wants to ensure that it can serve these customers and also ensure these vehicles don't have a negative impact on the power grid," Legace said. When Mazyar Mortazavi, CEO of TAS Design Build, decided to re-develop the old Shriner’s temple on Keele Street, south of Sheppard, he was keenly aware of the emerging urban context around what may seem like an unremarkable address on 1960s-vintage suburban arterial.
Just to the west was the finger of the meandering Black Creek ravine system. Across Keele: Downsview Park, replete with open spaces, recreational amenities and, as of a few months ago, a brand new subway/GO station (Downsview Park). York University, the Humber River Hospital and Highway 401 are just a bit further afield. Mr. Mortazavi observes that TAS’s new 300-unit mid-rise, designed by Teeple Architects and dubbed the Keeley, is landing in a part of the city that is being transformed by the accumulation of highly desirable urban infrastructure within a traditionally low-density setting. Downsview, he says, “is an incredible opportunity.” Open this photo in gallery The Keeley, a new 300-unit mid-rise designed by Teeple Architects, will be part of Downsview’s transformation. TAS, evidently, isn’t the only investor to be thinking such thoughts. The $871-million sale earlier this month of Bombardier Aerospace’s Downsview plant and airstrip to the Public Sector Pension Investment Board points to the long-term redevelopment of 371 acres of mostly fallow industrial land east of Downsview Park. The sprawling site – it is roughly half the size of Toronto’s Portlands and wraps around a working-class enclave that once housed the factory’s employees – enjoys even more locational advantages than TAS’s project: proximity to three subway stops as well as the cluster of big box retailers south of the runway. The opportunity to rethink this oddly shaped gap in the city will have “excellent ripple effects on the community around it,” predicts planning expert Laura Taylor, an associate professor at York’s faculty of environmental studies. “The airport lands have been like a military installation. It’s been a keep-out zone.” The big question facing PSPIB, the city’s planning officials, developers and local residents is how re-urbanize a giant void that has long been reserved exclusively for employment and industrial uses, with residential development strictly prohibited. PSPIB has quietly retained a leading planning consultancy, but the re-zoning process will take many years. And if previous controversy over proposed high-rise development at the fringes of Downsview Park is any indication, the eventual plan will also attract opposition from homeowners living in the vicinity of the airport. City officials, however, say they won’t be in a position to field an official plan amendment (OPA) for at least two years owing to a backlog of appeals. That enforced bureaucratic delay, however, may be a blessing in disguise. Citing examples such as the redevelopment of the waterfront lands, the Unilever site or the Woodbine race track, planning experts point out that large tracts such as Downsview pose all sorts of tough questions about the mix of uses, densities, staging and the creation of new public amenities, as well as the area’s eventual relationship with the communities beyond its borders. “There’s a lot of handshaking to be done with the urban fabric around it,” says Kevin Harper, development manager for Minto Communities, in Ottawa. The process, he adds, “will be fascinating.” Given the city’s focus on protecting employment lands and ensuring that redevelopment doesn’t lead to a net reduction of jobs within the city, it’s almost certain that any new vision for the Downsview airport site will include zoning for office, commercial or light-industrial development. Indeed, the area around the combined Downsview Park subway/GO station could potentially become the core of a new mobility hub, positioned as destination for commuter journeys. But, as Prof. Taylor cautions, the viability of any such a plan will depend entirely on demand for new office, commercial or institutional space. Open this photo in gallery The sale earlier this month of Bombardier Aerospace’s Downsview plant and airstrip points to the long-term redevelopment of 371 acres of mostly fallow industrial land east of Downsview Park. As city planners well know, residential developers will also be eyeing the parcels of land within a few minutes walk of those stations. Peter Zimmerman, president of New Commons Development, says the PSP should be looking at a thoroughly mixed-use approach that includes employment and mid-rise affordable housing. “That’s got to be part of the deal,” he says. “That kind of balance is the best thing on so many levels.” In fact, Mr. Zimmerman and others hope that a pension fund, which has long investment horizons and a desire for predictable cash flow, will focus on spurring the development of plenty of purpose-built rental housing when the site is rezoned. Besides the mix, tenure and massing of any new development, the planning for Downsview will require significant investments in the public realm, including a new internal road system that links the east and west sides of the property and provides connectivity to development within the site. Prof. Taylor suggests the airport’s runway, which conspicuously interrupts the city’s north-south concession grid, could potentially be transformed into an arterial spine, creating a main street with a series of angled intersections that produce both a sense of place and distinctive architecture. “It’s part of the historic landscape.” Mr. Harper agrees: “You would end up interesting spaces at grade.” Others point to the importance of linking the Downsview airport lands to Downsview Park, which sits on the west side of the GO rail corridor. One idea, says Mike Collins-Williams, policy director for the Ontario Home Builders Association, is to consolidate any parkland dedications arising from mixed-use redevelopment of the airport into a contiguous east-west green space, with a land bridge over the rail line and into Downsview Park. “With the park there, there’s such great potential.” More generally, Mr. Collins-Williams adds, the city and the pension fund’s consultants must be “thinking long term” because of the unique alignment of a property that has come fully loaded with all manner of city-building components. “This project has the potential to remake that area of Toronto,” he says. “There are multiple spokes on the wheel here.” Toronto land-transfer tax revenue beats expectations by $30-million despite market decline5/28/2018
Despite a slide in residential home prices and sales, Toronto brought in $30-million more than expected from its land-transfer tax in the first three months of the year, thanks to an unexpected boost from the commercial real estate market.
Critics have compared the city’s operating budget to a gamble on the real estate market, as Toronto has relied heavily on ballooning revenues from its land-transfer tax to balance its books every year. Open this photo in gallery In recent years, Toronto has relied heavily on revenues from ballooning land-transfer taxes, a practice some senior city officials have warned could backfire in the event of a real estat market crash. Senior city officials have repeatedly warned that this could backfire in a real estate market crash, forcing the city – which by law cannot borrow to run an operating budget deficit – to slash services or hike property taxes. But according to a new report from the city’s interim chief financial officer, Joe Farag, Toronto collected $156-million from the tax in the first quarter, $30-million, or 24 per cent, more than the $126-million originally projected. The report, headed to council’s budget committee on Monday, credits “higher-than-anticipated non-residential market activity” for the boost. Gary Crawford, the Scarborough councillor who serves as Mayor John Tory’s budget chief, said he also believes the city is still too reliant on the tax – but insists predictions of imminent doom were overstated. “Everybody said the sky was falling … but we are probably going to be fine,” Mr. Crawford said in an interview. City officials are still predicting that by year’s end, the tax will bring in the full $817-million they had banked on, the same total it produced last year. As a precautionary measure, the city’s 2018 budget assumed that the land-transfer tax would remain flat, despite the fact it usually brings in tens of millions more than projected each year. Councillor Gord Perks, a critic of Toronto’s mayor, says the city has for too long used windfall revenue from the real estate market to keep property taxes unrealistically low. He says he is not reassured by the latest numbers, which he suggests may just put off a financial crisis by several months or a year. “Evidently, we caught a lucky break,” Mr. Perks said in an interview. “But it seems to be a one-time lucky break. The fundamentals are still deeply worrisome.” The extra tax revenue in the first quarter comes despite headlines about the continuing sag in Toronto’s residential property market. According to the latest numbers from the Canadian Real Estate Association, prices in the Greater Toronto Area were down 5 per cent in April on average compared with the same month last year. In a report on the city’s long-term financial plans released in March, then-city manager Peter Wallace warned Toronto City Council of the danger of relying on “volatile” land-transfer tax revenue, which he described as a “moderate but growing risk.” City officials have been watching the tax closely. According to a March 6 e-mail obtained by The Globe and Mail through a freedom-of-information request, Mr. Wallace was told that land-transfer tax revenues were down about 15 per cent in January and February from 2017 numbers. However, city staff said the market typically picks up in May. In contrast to the city’s cooling residential market, observers say low unemployment and a bustling economy has Toronto’s commercial property market on fire. City officials say the boost to tax revenue came in March from a series of eight non-residential transactions all worth more than $40-million. Typically, 25 per cent of land-transfer tax revenues come from commercial lands sales, with residential sales making up the rest. “The industrial markets are just red-hot,” said Stuart Barron, the national director of research for real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield. “You might say that in the past 35 years, we’ve never seen anything like it.” The report going to budget committee on Monday also projects the city will see a $10.1-million shortfall over all on its $11-billion operating budget by the end of 2018. It blames the problem on new spending by the city’s shelter department, which has been dealing with an influx of homeless people and refugee claimants, and added hiring and overtime costs for Toronto police, which has said some of the bills come from recent high-profile investigations. Toronto has got its residents down in the dumps, according to a study that says people who live in rural areas are happier than those in urban areas.
A team of happiness researchers at the University of British Columbia and McGill University has published a working paper on the geography of well-being in Canada. They compiled 400,000 responses to a pair of national Canadian surveys, to parse out distinctions in well-being for more than 1,200 communities, which, collectively represent the country’s entire geography. In general, Canadians are pretty happy, but the researcher’s chief finding is that a striking association between population density and happiness. When the researchers ranked all 1,215 communities by average happiness, they found that average population density in the 20 per cent most-miserable communities was more than eight times greater than in the happiest 20 per cent of communities. “Life is significantly less happy in urban areas,” the paper concluded. In the GTA, densely populated areas such as Toronto, Hamilton and Kitchener stand out as islands of relative unhappiness in a sea of satisfaction in the hinterlands. “It’s not really useful to think … it’s just better to live in a rural area,” said Chris Barrington-Leigh, one of the authors of the study. He explained that people in cities often have fewer social connections nearby, and feel less connected to their communities than people in rural areas. “There’s nothing stopping us building strong communities as much as we can in cities,” he said. The happiness measure is derived from a survey question that asks responses to rate “how satisfied” respondents are with their lives, on a scale from 1 to 10. Across Canada, community-level average responses to this question range from 7.04 to 8.94. The authors found that the happiest communities had shorter commute times and less expensive housing, and that a smaller share of the population was foreign-born. Foreign-born Canadians tend to have fewer social connections, and may be less embedded in their communities, leading to less happiness. They also found that people in the happiest communities are less transient than in the least-happy communities, that they are more likely to attend church and that they are significantly more likely to feel a “sense of belonging” in their communities. It may seem contradictory that greater happiness is correlated with both lower population density (implying fewer interpersonal interactions), but studies indicate that small towns and rural areas are more conducive than cities to forming strong social bonds, which would explain some of the greater sense of belonging observed in the happiest Canadian communities. “Think about how and where we spend our time, and where we have interactions with people that relate to meaningful things in our lives,” Barrington-Leigh said. “We’re incredibly social beings, and having close relationships and meaningful productive activities with people seems to be very important.” Perhaps even more surprising are the factors that don’t appear to play a major role in community-level differences in happiness: average income levels and rates of unemployment and education. People may move to cities for good-paying jobs, but the Canadian study strongly suggests it’s not making them any happier. But that doesn’t mean that low-population density causes happiness. A miserable city dweller who moves to the country might simply become a miserable country dweller, in other words. However, it’s clear that there’s something about small towns and rural life that’s associated with greater levels of self-reported happiness among people who live in those places. How Metrolinx is Taking Service to the Next Level
May 15, 2018 -- Whenever Metrolinx CEO Phil Verster is on a bus or a train, he makes it a point to ask commuters about their GO Transit experience. According to Verster, no two issues are raised more than Wi-Fi and capacity. It's clear commuters don't only want to be connected to more people and places, but they want a good on-board transit experience as well. Metrolinx is listening, and is working on making its system the best it can be for its customers. Below is a summary, as provided by Metrolinx, on how the Crown Agency is creating a better transit experience for its customers today and for generations to come:
The updated District Plan Report and all supporting documents can be viewed and downloaded by clicking on the links below.
Updated District Plan Report Covering Letter (which identifies major changes to the District Plan since the original submission) Updated Urban Design Guidelines Updated Affordable Housing Strategy Updated Community Services & Facilities Strategy Updated Public Art Strategy Transportation Addendum Update letter on the Functioning Servicing Report LEED ND Feasibility Report The planes will keep flying at Buttonville Municipal Airport in Markham -- for at least the next five years anyway.
Cadillac Fairview, along with Armadale Co. Limited and Torontoair Ltd. announced on Friday, April 27 that they would continue operations at the local airport until at least the spring of 2023 and possibly longer. Cadillac Fairview and Armadale, who co-own the Buttonville lands, have applied for an application to rezone the lands for a 175-acre, $4-billion project that could create between 15,000 to 24,000 jobs and house 6,000 to 7,000 residents. But the project has been stalled for several years at the Ontario Municipal Board, apparently over a disagreement over infrastructure fees developers would pay to the Region of York to widen roadways around the airport lands. Anna Ng, a spokesperson for Cadillac Fairview, says negotiations continue over the development application at the OMB with the Region of York. She said the renewal of the airport licence, which was due to expire this October, was par for the course. Rental prices outside in the Greater Toronto Area and beyond are climbing closer to Toronto's and that's because more people are looking to rent instead of buy, real estate experts say.
A new study by the Canadian Rental Housing Index (CRHI) examined census data to find that between 2011 and 2016 around 753,000 new households were created -- of those, more than half were renters. "With escalating prices keeping many Canadians from affording home ownership … more people are entering the rental market or staying in the rental market longer," said Jeff Morrison, executive director of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association. The problem of pricey real estate and rental units is well-known in Toronto and that's why Jonathan Lau moved to Mississauga. This Toronto native, Jonathan Lau, was driven out of the city four years ago due to rising rental prices. (Joe Fiorino/CBC) "I lived in Toronto my whole life. It wasn't until Toronto started increasing its prices where I had to move out to this part just to pay rent," Lau told CBC Toronto. He says what he pays for his rental unit is decent, since he moved into the city's Burnhamthorpe area four years ago. But now one-bedrooms are going for the same price as his two-bedroom apartment. "They're about $1,500," said Lau, adding that's closer to what it would cost to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto. The CRHI report says another reason for the rent increases in places such as Mississauga and Vaughan is there's fewer rental units available. Margie Carlson, the deputy executive director of the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association, blames that on prioritizing sprawling detached-home developments over mid-rise affordable rental units. "The government left it up to the private market to make decisions," said Carlson. "We've seen single detached homes put up in our suburbs. What we really need there is more density." What Carlson finds really alarming is that high prices and low availability are forcing people to pay more than they can afford. The CRHI data shows that nearly one in five renter households are spending more than 50 per cent of their income on rent. To live comfortably, Carlson says, that number should be closer to 30 per cent. "What happens when people can't afford their rent, they may miss a payment ... they also may need to access food banks because they can't afford to pay for the other things," said Carlson. The Ontario government introduced the fair housing plan last year, which includes creating more affordable and family-sized rental housing. But Carlson says it will be a while before the effects of that are seen and the pressures ease in the GTA. |
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