This has been an uncertain year in the world of housing. Looming above all else has been the vaporization of the American subprime mortgage market and its increasing impact on housing starts and prices in all sectors and regions. There can be little doubt that the era of cheap money that pushed U.S. real estate higher and higher has come to an end.
But if the Americans are in meltdown, why have housing prices been able to thrive in Canada, and boom here in the West? I would like to report that this was solely because of sage policies by our governments and lending agencies, but they have played a relatively small part.
We should all note that Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. and other Canadian lending agencies have shown some signs of the U.S. contagion — quick approvals for ever-lower down payments combined with increasingly elaborate mechanisms to reduce payments temporarily. The U.S. housing market is sick in bed, maybe headed for hospital, while in Canada we are feeling a little off but keep going to work. And we worry that this decision will come back to haunt us.
It will.
Dwelling
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A housing lull would allow us to contemplate affordable and creative housing. Pictured is a courtyard in the Salvation army’s Belkin House apartment complex in Vancouver. (NEAL STANISKIS DOLL ADAMS ARCHITECTS)
The Globe and Mail
Housing has hung on here not because of some inherent strength of the housing sector north of the 49th parallel but because the world regards us as a commodity-based economy, and Canada's most commodity-linked economies are west of Manitoba. So it's no surprise that that is also where the gains in housing prices and sales numbers have been steepest. The inflow of money and residents have kept our housing markets sprightly — but the good news is unlikely to continue in 2008.
Every first-year business school student learns the historical facts of the global business cycle — the booms and busts that can be charted back 150 years and more. More than anything else, the ups and downs of the business cycle are tied to commodity prices. As industrial economies shift into high gear, the prices of raw materials get pushed up, eventually getting so high that they start to choke off growth. The huge rise in construction costs in recent years, especially in Western Canada, is but one sign that a reckoning is coming. Even now, escalating costs are making new investments ever trickier for developers and purchasers both.
We have yet to see the real economic impact of what appears to be a collapse of the B.C. forest industry, and no one dares to think how much our housing markets have been sustained by a huge blip of baby boomers lining up the homes and recreational retreats for their retirement years.
But we will.
When the next business cycle commences, it will take a long time for commodity prices to recover, even once the industrial economies of Eastern Canada, the United States and Europe start firing on all cylinders again. Alberta and British Columbia are now full of swagger, apparently convinced that economic swings are things of the past, that our boom will continue forever because of Asian demand for the raw things we pump, mine or cut down. But in a year or two we will slump while others rebound, and in our sulk we will blame others and then, eventually, ourselves.
Western Canada is too blessed and optimistic a place, in the scale of things globally, to suffer much more than a 10-per-cent decline in housing prices, I predict.
Moreover, there are advantages in these contractions, a time to consider quality, think about the direction of our cities, get down to actual solutions to homelessness and affordability.
I have written about B.C. housing 52 times over the past year, and in my entire career as an architecture critic, I have never had so many innovative, amenable and all-round creative dwellings to write about as in 2007.
There was some welcome investment by our provincial government in supportive housing for our most vulnerable, and let's hope the new year finds similar attention to the needs of the working poor, single-parent families, students and the so-called cultural creatives who have been priced out of adequate places to live, and just as worrisome, places to work.
At the municipal level, and thanks in large part to a heroic effort by our city planners, we are at long last starting to see the clear outlines of what Vancouver's EcoDensity policies will mean for the city and, later, other places in the province.
These ideas are too important to stand or fall with Mayor Sam Sullivan's political career, so I hope all factions of our fractured polity can come to agree on action. Whether it is Mr. Sullivan, Carole Taylor or some champion of the left who, as the city's next mayor, makes the final push toward a sustainable future does not really matter — so important is the issue.
With the correction ahead, we will learn something about economic sustainability. That will help us make parallel decisions about environmental sustainability, too.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Teenage girls are more likely than boys to have engaged in creating most kinds of online content, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. They are more likely to have created a blog, more likely to have joined a social-networking site like Facebook and more likely to post pictures online. The study used telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 935 Americans age 12 to 17.
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Surprisingly, teenagers from single-parent households are more likely to have started a blog than teenagers living with married parents; those in lower-income houses are more likely to blog than those in families with higher-income brackets.
The Pew study also charts the decline in teenagers’ use of e-mail, which has been largely supplanted by cellphone text messaging and by the chat features of social-networking sites. Only 14 percent of the teenagers reported sending e-mail messages to their friends every day.
“E-mail is not the primary way you talk to your friends,” said Amanda Lenhart, one of the authors of the report. “It’s used to talk with groups, if you’re planning something complicated and you need to send long, letterlike messages.”
nobel?
Doris Lessing will never be confused with the Internet’s exhibitionist personality Tila Tequila, but winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in October helped Ms. Lessing’s status on MySpace. What once was 125 friends before the announcement from the Nobel committee has now topped 350 friends.
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Times Topics: Doris Lessing
Ms. Lessing, who is 88, has been described as blithely unfamiliar with the Internet, relying on the efforts of a fan, Jan Hanford, to keep her MySpace page and Web site up and running.
But, as was made clear from her Nobel lecture this month with the misdirected title, “On Not Winning the Nobel Prize,” Ms. Lessing isn’t “blithely” anything about the state of the world.
“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers,” she said in her speech. “We never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new Internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc.?”
Ms. Hanford, the woman who has been Ms. Lessing’s bridge to the Internet, declined to comment on Ms. Lessing’s speech.
But some literary-minded bloggers seemed a little piqued.
One admiring blogger, at Lee’sRiver, would only admit to “a slight annoyance and smile at her old fuddy-duddy crossness with ‘blogging or blugging’ as she puts it.”
Another, Carolyn Kellogg, an M.F.A. student in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh, writing at Pinky’s Paperhaus, gave her post the headline, “Blog and Put a Dagger in Doris Lessing’s Heart.” “Although I am sure Doris Lessing isn’t reading this blug,” she wrote, “I hope that someone points her to One Laptop Per Child.”
Tila Tequila has 1.7 million Myspace friends.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
test post
Compared variously to a floating pearl and a duck egg, the titanium-and-glass half-dome of the National Center for the Performing Arts formally opened its underwater entryway to Chinese officials and dignitaries here over the weekend.
The $400 million complex, a concert hall, opera house and theater under one space age span, is designed to be the center of Chinese culture, just as Tiananmen Square next door was designated this country’s political center.
The complex’s lush, dazzling interior, sophisticated acoustics and mechanical wizardry rival any hall in Europe or the United States, its promoters say. Chen Ping, the center’s director, proclaimed it “a concrete example of China’s rising soft power and comprehensive national strength” during the opening ceremony on Saturday night.
Yet the center, designed by the French architect Paul Andreu, has attracted at least as much attention for its cost overruns, safety concerns and provocative aesthetics.
And the hall’s artistic directors, appointed after prolonged bureaucratic squabbling, had to scramble to line up a credible schedule of performances for the premier season, which runs from late December until April, organizers said.
The opening event was an eclectic sampler of Chinese and Western musical classics, with two conductors, two orchestras, four choral groups and a half-dozen soloists, a mélange that showed off the building’s acoustics but underscored its continuing search for an artistic mission.
Li Changchun, a senior Communist Party leader, was the guest of honor at the event, broadcast on national television. At each interlude in the program camera operators hustled to the row in front of Mr. Li to record him clapping.
The center joins a list of monoliths designed by foreign architects — the bird’s-nest Olympic stadium and the cantilevered towers of China Central Television’s new headquarters among them — that have remade the Beijing skyline and projected the soaring ambitions and bulging coffers of the Communist Party leadership.
Mr. Andreu’s creation joins the Shanghai Grand Theater, designed by another Frenchman, Jean-Marie Charpentier, as one of the top performance halls in China.
That field will grow crowded, however, as other cities pour hundreds of millions of dollars into their own cultural showcases. Zaha Hadid, the London architect, is building an opera house for Guangzhou, a provincial capital. The architect Carlos Ott, a Canadian born in Uruguay, has four contracts for performance halls in smaller cities.
Whether this adds up to a cultural renaissance or an edifice contest remains unclear. China has produced first-rate classical musicians, including the pianists Yundi Li, who performed a solo on Saturday night, and Lang Lang. Yet its musical groups, ballets and symphony orchestras have received far less attention than the concert halls. They face financial constraints, political censorship and public indifference.
“China needs a top national performance hall of this kind,” Wu Zuqiang, who heads the center’s arts committee, said in an interview before it opened. “But promoting national culture will take extended efforts, and will require some adjustments in our approach.”
Officials call the complex the largest performing arts center in the world, twice as big as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. It was designed to be conspicuous.
Mr. Andreu said that he envisioned the hall as a tribute to the traditional Chinese image of heaven and earth, round above square. His bubblelike soaring glass dome encloses several performance spaces and is suspended above a shallow pool. Viewed at night, illuminated from within, the dome resembles a spaceship hovering over a calm lake. But on dim days when the haze and dust of Beijing cover the silvery titanium shell, the hall can look no more distinguished than an airport service hangar.
A few years ago a group of Chinese architects organized a vocal petition campaign to protest the design. They said it blended poorly with the Stalinist Great Hall of the People next door and high vermilion walls of the imperial Forbidden City across the street.
Their effort received a boost in 2004 when the roof of a new terminal building at the Charles de Gaulle International Airport near Paris, which Mr. Andreu also designed, collapsed. Some critics of the design said that the complex’s entryway, a subterranean glass-enclosed corridor extending 250 feet under the artificial lake, posed safety risks in the event of structural problems or a terrorist attack.
The project faced stoppages and reviews, and was several years late and many tens of millions of dollars over budget.