Mock Turtle

I think we know how this story goes. After months of slower sales and record-high inventory, Toronto’s real estate prices begin their descent:

In the City of Toronto the average price declined one per cent to $377,990 from last August’s $381,681.

Existing home sales in the city were down 25% year-over-year, which qualifies as “stable” according to the Toronto Real Estate Board. Any retailer that reported a 25% drop in same-store sales would be considered to be “tanking”. Inventory, meanwhile, has increased by 31%.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the psychological effect of this slight drop accelerates further reductions in prices.

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I hope Toronto Life didn’t pay full freight to Philip Preville, whose cover story “PS, I Love You” (not yet posted online) adorns the magazine’s September “The Right School” issue. Here’s how the story is billed:

A handful of schools drive parents into a frenzy of status lust — and they’ll do anything to get their kids in. How Toronto developed a two-tier public education system.

And here’s what the story actually contains:

A few anecdotes about parents intent on, if not exactly desperate to, get their children into Jackman school, padded by a few fawning paragraphs about the quality of the donated items at the school’s silent auction. (Preville clearly doesn’t get out to many charity fundraisers.) I guess collecting some horror stories while shopping along the Danforth — Preville lives in Riverdale, according to his late, unlamented blog on torontolife.com — was easier than branching out to another neighbourhood or digging into whether all other less-demanded schools are inferior. It might have been interesting to look at whether this was a new or old phenomenon, or compare the situation here to other cities, or, you know, do something beyond polish up some rumours overheard at the Big Carrot.

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..neatly summarized in one paragraph of the Star’s story on the shootings in the Annex:

Marc Biginelli, 21, watched events unfold from Bloor St. He said a tall young black man wearing a black T-shirt and baggy jeans came at the group from behind, gun in hand, and that he was “very tense, very aggressive.” Ryan Wilson, a bouncer at the Brunswick House, described the shooter as a white man in his early 20s.

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I’m with Barry Hertz of the National Post — time for Toronto to calm the fuck down when it comes to heat alerts. He tracked the panic , visiting several cooling centres yesterday — as he puts it, “one of those perfect summer days we could only dream of last winter.”

Some highlights of his heat-crazed day:

3:00 CP24 anchor Teresa Kruze says “it is dangerously hot out there.” The temperature displayed in the weather box to her immediate right says it is 28C….

4:51 Inside Metro Hall, there is a sign directing visitors to the “emergency cooling centre,” with letters in an appropriately frost-tipped font. Get ready for some sweet, sweet cooling action. I get a paper cup filled with room-temperature water. Besides two people ready to hand out water, I am the only person at the three tables at the cooling centre.

Besides the fact that panicking over 25-degree weather is ludicrous, there’s the unfortunate corollary of overusage of power, as people who move from house to car to office have no idea whether they actually feel hot or cold nor any intention of dressing for the weather, but rather take their advice from CP24 and crank up the air conditioning unquestioningly, leading to:

Media Advisory - Ontario’s Electricity Demand Rises by 20 Per Cent in Three Days
TORONTO, July 17 /CNW/ - As Ontarians turn on their air conditioners to
deal with the heat and humidity, electricity use in the province increases
significantly. Electricity demand is almost 4,000 MW or 20 per cent higher
today than on Monday July 14. This increase in electricity use is equivalent
to adding the needs of a city twice the size of Mississauga to the provincial
power system.

… with home power prices, of course, capped to encourage as much usage as possible (at the expense of well, everyone, including the poor saps who conserve).

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Could the communications team at the Toronto Real Estate Board be the worst in the city? Granted, TREB is the lobby group representing realtors, know most for erratic capitalization and repeated punctuation marks. And, OK, it’s hard to put out press release after press release about a deflating market after years of hyperbolic boasting about strength, robustness, and all-time records. But all that aside, the strategy behind communicating the June sales figures is bizarre.

The teaser message on the TREB website points out that while sales this June were down 18% from last June, last June was an all-time record. Fair enough. Then, in an effort to make the dramatic drop in sales even less shocking, TREB helpfully points out that June 2008 was not the first — second — third — or fourth best June on record, but the fifth. Is that really a point to recommend it?

The release itself is confusing because it tries to explain that the 2008 to 2007 drop in sales isn’t really so bad because the increase in 2006 to 2007 was so large. That would make some sense if 2008 was the, say, second best June on record, but the fact that it’s the fifth suggests there’s more backtracking than simply an easing off last year’s peak.

The release leads with the inevitable increase in prices, which has continued despite the double-digit decrease in sales (oddly, not mentioned until the sixth paragraph).

Sales of resale housing in the GTA were down 18% in June 2008 over June 2007. But, as the release points out, there was a 20% increase in sales between 2006 and 2007. So 2008 sales were down only 1% compared to June 2006. Um… great?

And here, more confusing comparisons without any conclusion to comfort you about the healthy, balanced GTA housing market:

In the City of Toronto, sales for the first two quarters declined 15 per cent to 17,370 from 20,574 in 2007 and down 8 per cent from 18,917 in 2006. In the 905 Region sales declined 12 per cent to 26,315 from 30,074 in 2007 and down 2 per cent from 26,880 in 2006. However, when you compare the first two quarters of 2007 with the same period in 2006, sales increased by 9 per
cent in the City of Toronto and by 12 per cent in the 905 Region.

Does the “however” really fit there? Do the 2007/2006 comparisons somehow negate the drop between 2008/2007? If phrased another way, I suppose they could provide useful context, but here, they really don’t: sales are down, but last year they were up. Huh.

Houses — don’t know how many, since TREB only releases inventory information when it’s in its interest, not when inventory is reaching rumoured all-time highs — are taking longer to sell, but according to TREB head Maureen O’Neill, that’s a good thing: “This has given buyers and sellers a little more time to make well-considered decisions.”

Where are the hot spots in the GTA, you wonder? Well, there’s Brooklin. Where? Brooklin, Ontario, population 15,000.

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Wonder how many additional house sales were needed in Brooklin to increase over 35% last year’s June sales — 5?

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From today’s Globe. It seems the identity of the seller is more important than the property — which doesn’t say much for the property. I’d imagine this sales pitch appeals greatly to a specific type of southern Ontario Anglophile, though:

BRITISH HEIRESS

Due to declining years wishes to sell country estate, 1 hour from Toronto. 5.19 acs wooded setting. 3000 sq. ft. home, 5 bdrm & 2 bdrm gardener’s cottage. Garden of the Year award. Excellent investment at $600,000.

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I can’t believe I’m bothering to quarrel with a report from the Fraser Institute, but sometimes it’s just too tempting to resist. The right-wing think tank released a survey yesterday that will be the foundation of its urban policy research agenda, headed up by that champion of cities, former Ontario premier Mike Harris. Among the findings, according to the Star’s report:

Sixty-two per cent of respondents said the city does not spend money efficiently and 63 per cent believe its tax policies are driving business away. Forty per cent worry Toronto is falling behind other cities such as Calgary or Vancouver.

Wow, sounds serious. Except:

The findings, based on the responses of 653 residents surveyed earlier this month, are considered accurate to within 3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

I’d be floored if pollsters could find 653 residents of Toronto who could actually identify the key services the city funds — especially those downloaded services that still, more than a decade later, don’t really make sense as city-funded given the limited avenues of revenue generation permitted the city. I’d be even more amazed if any part of the 653 had any insight into how much those services should cost, and how much Toronto paid for them versus other GTA municipalities — which, by the way, have higher property taxes. So given that, I’m not particularly concerned about what 653 semi-informed residents of the city contacted by the Fraser Institute think, though the findings might give the mayor’s PR team another wake-up call. And, unlike former premier Harris, I’m not sure the findings suggest that Torontonians are looking for “leadership” or a “vision” for their city’s future — it sounds more to me like the findings confirm that 98% of Torontonians are completely unengaged with how their city is run and are blind to any vision grounded in reality.

(For an assessment of the city’s fiscal position and efficiency record grounded in research, check out the Blueprint for Fiscal Stability and Economic Prosperity submitted by a blue-ribbon panel of business and labour leaders in February.)

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The original hat tip for this in the Toronto blogosphere goes to 299bloorcallcontrol, as far as I’m aware, though Spacing has weighed in:

The TTC has just begun installing a new 2008 edition of its subway network maps in subway cars … The TTC did away with just displaying the approximate address numbers along Yonge, Bloor, Danforth and Sheppard (only printing the street name where the subway deviated form one of those four streets), and now has the precise municipal address for each station. Coxwell Station now has a Strathmore Boulevard address, instead of 1568 Danforth Avenue, and Rosedale is now at 7 Crescent Road instead of 1009 Yonge.

This new system is useless when looking for the closest station to an address on Bloor or Danforth. On Yonge, this is especially redundant, as not only are the stations already named for the cross streets, Yonge is also the origin point for addresses east and west of that street. So knowing that Dundas Station is actually at 3 Dundas Street East is not that helpful.

–

Has anyone else noticed that two of the addresses are wrong? St. Andrew Station should be on King Street West, not East, and Castle Frank Station should be on Bloor Street East, not West.

Comment by Annika

June 26, 2008 @ 12:18 am

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Ever-wise city councillors vote to kill street life on Bloor. I guess they’re hoping this will transform the exciting line-up of nondescript architecture, inexpensive European chain clothing stores and discounters into Toronto’s own answer to the Magnificent Mile. If you’d rather be able to buy the occasional hot dog, well, perhaps you should just move:

Councillor Peter Milczyn said the widened sidewalks planned will enhance the attractiveness of Toronto for visitors. “Indeed there’s a place in our city for some street vendors,” Milczyn said. “But to those who like Middle Eastern bazaars, go to the Middle East.”

Do you ever get the feeling that, despite the odd well-publicized junkets, many of our local politicians have never been to any large cities outside their own?

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Do you remember Tyler Roulston? What about Tristan Wright? Jonathan Rodrigues? What high schools did they go to? They were all shooting victims under the age of 25 this year in Toronto. One may have been known to police. Another was shot in front of a house party with dozens of witnesses. Another was killed at home. Unfortunately, since they all died in the “east end”, where shootings are apparently just another inconvenience of being poor, not white, and living in a high-rise, I can’t tell you much more about them.

On the other hand, I know a lot about Dylan Ellis and Oliver Martin. They grew up in Rosedale. They’d completed postsecondary education. Girls had crushes on them. They participated in organized sports. This morning’s Globe and Mail even tells me what one of them liked as a favourite snack. Did I mention they grew up in Rosedale?

And, it seems, the police also know a lot about the two. In some magical fashion, although the two were “not known” to police, Det. Sgt. Gary Giroux was almost instantly able to assert to reporters just hours after they were shot that they were “certainly not – and never have been – living any high-risk or criminal lifestyle”. It’s easy to see why this conclusion was easy to draw. As we all know, the wealthy are never involved in criminal activity.

A paragraph in the Globe clumsily highlights why this story has been the focus of so much ink, when random shootings of young men in the city are anything but unusual:

The violent crime shook the city and surprised many who struggled to understand why the young men from Rosedale were killed in a brand of crime associated with neighbourhoods very different from their own.

I don’t mean to be minimize the sadness of this situation. It just seems to me that the violent, random, untimely deaths of young men who had little are just as tragic as the violent, random, untimely deaths of young men who had it all. And it also seems to me that Martin and Ellis’ families now have a lot in common with many other bereaved families in neighbourhoods “very different from their own” — whatever the reporting around this story might suggest.

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