The boulevard is back

By Sam Reiss

The boulevard is back, according to The Star’s Christopher Hume. To employ a word as old-fashioned as the notion of a boulevard — huzzah!

In his column last week, Hume said, “After an absence of decades, the boulevard is coming back to Toronto. Despite long ago having fallen from favour among North American city planners and traffic engineers [since the 1930s, traffic engineers have avoided boulevards because they are thought to be at odds with their preferred ‘functional’ approach], the multi-lane, multi-use, tree-lined avenue will soon return to our fair burg.”

He goes on to laud Waterfront Toronto for its role in this renaissance, calling it “one of the  main proponents of urban thinking in this city.” I’d like to heap some lauding of my own on there.

They broke ground on a Queen’s Quay transformation this week, with the objective of changing it from “messy and dysfunctional” to use Hume’s words, to “elegant,” a wide street shared by cyclists, walkers, cars, public transit, and trees. All great news, but Hume’s most evocative turn of phrase was this: Where conventional streets seek to eliminate complexity, the boulevard embraces it. Yes, please, let’s embrace some complexity!

Toronto is built on a virtually flat landscape, aside perhaps from the St. Clair escarpment. It may be easy on pedestrians, but it doesn’t offer much to sight-seers. So what did our founding fathers do? Built our streets on a grid; great for finding your way around, but lousy for getting lost — say, on purpose, on an unexpectedly warm and sunny winter day.

Our pin-straight arteries and mostly flat landscape have already sucked some of the potential out of the city visually, and then we make boring architectural choices and top it off with efficient but equally boring streets.

Boulevards are wonderful. Although narrow alleyways are fun too — try Kensington Market — there’s no better way to feel some pride in this place than to stroll along University Avenue in the summer. There’s something really affecting about the luxuriousness of all that space; the sheer width of the street seems decadent. Being surrounded by urban amenities, lots of traffic and other people, office buildings and Starbucks, while still being able to literally stop and smell the roses, is a real treat. And this is Canada, for crying out loud. We have nothing if not space.

It feels like there’s an attitude shift afoot in the Big Smoke. Interesting architecture (I’m looking at you, L Tower), pedestrian-friendliness, public art, even food trucks that sell more than hot dogs — and now, boulevards! If we’re not careful, we might just turn Toronto into that world-class city we like to think it is.

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Well, it looks like the housing market is officially cooling. The Canadian Real Estate Association said that sales of existing homes in Canada fell in October from September and year-over-year, although the numbers were puny — down 0.1% in October over September, and 0.8% from a year ago.

“Housing market trends in Canada can be characterized as before and after regulatory changes,” according to TD Economics senior economist Sonya Gulati; in July, the government tightened mortgage lending rules in an effort to cool a too-hot market and avoid U.S.-style, debt-driven collapse.

According to a BMO Capital Markets economist, “It looks at this point like the elusive soft landing is taking shape.” He added that Canada’s market looked balanced overall, in spite of “clear pockets” of strength and weakness. BMO delineated the market thus:

Vancouver: among Canada’s least favourable market conditions, with sales-to-new-listings ratio averaging less than 39% in the last three months; MLS Home Price Index below year-ago levels; prices down nearly 3% in the last six months; still the highest valuations in Canada at about 10 times estimated family income.

Calgary: sales up almost 20% year-over-year in last three months; market now close to full-scale sellers’ territory; prices up 6.7% year-over-year in October; affordability still favourable relative to Toronto and Vancouver, at a little more than four times median income.

Toronto: condos cooled significantly since mortgage changes, with sales down 16% year-over-year in past three months; still technically a balanced market, but leaning towards buyers; MLS index price still up 5% year-over-year in October; a stark divide between scarce detached (+6.5%) and more ample condos (+1.1% y/y, but down 1.2% since June); even as sales sag, some Southwestern Ontario cities are seeing sellers’ markets thanks to dearth of supply.

TD’s economist said that the low interest rate environment may pull homeowners back into the market in 2013, urging prices upwards once again, but that an absence of pent-up demand may leave the market in a “bit of a lull until interest rate hikes resume in late 2013.”

Although all seem to be agreed that the market has cooled for now, predications for the future are characteristically non-committal: either this will happen, or that other thing will happen. In other words, back to business as usual for the prognosticators.