Shouldn’t a ‘livable’ city also mean it’s affordable?
Study reveals unfortunate truism: high quality of life and shortage of housing go hand in hand
No fewer than three Canadian cities make the top five in the latest ranking of the world’s most livable cities by Britain’s Economist Intelligence Unit. Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary take the third to fifth spots, with just two European and no U.S. cities in the top 10.
First place goes to Melbourne, and there’s the rub. Melbourne is in the midst of a housing boom that has priced everyday Aussies out of the housing market.
That, of course, has been a curse for Toronto and Vancouver, having also experienced long housing booms akin to those of Melbourne and Sydney.
(Sydney recently slipped out of the top 10 on concerns of that city being more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, knocking off points on the all-important personal security metric.)
The unfortunate truism appears to be that high quality of life and shortage of affordable housing go hand in hand. Adelaide and Perth also make the latest top 10 list on livability. And Adelaide, too, suffers from a lack of sufficient affordable housing.
It seems obvious that if a place is more livable than others — a vibrant economy, above-average personal security, a treasure-house of cultural amenities and respect for the environment are among the deciding issues — people will come to that place in large numbers. And that will drive up housing costs.
Calgary, though, rebukes the truism. Perhaps a separate ranking of the world’s best-managed cities is in order, one that would showcase Calgary’s more sensible approach to urban planning. Toronto would score poorly on such a list.
There are three such rankings done each year, whose findings are remarkably consistent. They all show Canada and Australia in a good light.
None, however, take sufficiently into account whether people can actually afford to live in the “most livable” cities. When that question was put to the chief author of the Economist survey, he blithely suggested that people find a way to live in the likes of Melbourne, where the rate of home ownership, as elsewhere in Oz, has in fact dropped to the lowest level on record.
We need an alternate ranking of cities that are truly livable, because their urban-planning mavens have provided an adequate amount of affordable housing, using the tools of sensible zoning and government incentives for builders of reasonably priced shelter.
What happened to pipeline fever? Not long ago, North Americans were debating the merits of upward of half a dozen proposed pipeline megaprojects.
With TransCanada Corp.’s announcement last week that it has killed its Energy East heavy-oil pipeline connecting Alberta with Central Canadian markets, you have to wonder if any energy pipelines will be built.
Yes, TransCanada’s Keystone XL has been approved by U.S. President Donald Trump. But it still requires approval from several U.S. state governments. And that pipeline will take about a decade to build, by which time alternative energy may have priced oil out of much of the world market, rendering Keystone XL uneconomic.
The Kinder Morgan pipeline, which is to connect Alberta with West Coast terminals, has been approved by Ottawa. But it too must still obtain approvals from Indigenous groups and provincial and municipal regulators.
Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall, the one holdout premier against a provincial carbon-tax scheme, quickly blamed Ottawa for Energy East’s demise. For ill measure, Wall has also tried to stoke a renewed animosity between Western and Central Canada.
“For the West to continue on like this in our federal system is the equivalent of having Stockholm syndrome,” Wall wrote on Facebook.
The reality is that Energy East was a goner once Trump approved Keystone XL. The two proposed pipelines were seen in the oilpatch as rivals, and few oil producers would have committed to using both.
Energy East, which would have run through the northern reaches of the Greater Toronto Area with the same heavy-oil trains that destroyed Lac Megantic, would have run up against fierce opposition from countless large and small municipalities across Canada’s most densely population region.
What we have here is single-suited enterprises like TransCanada who are solely in the business of building and operating oil pipelines, at a time in history when already visible on the horizon is the day when we will no longer need oil pipelines.
That’s an obvious quandary for TransCanada and its crosstown rival Enbridge Inc. They and behind-the-door folks like Brad Wall will get nowhere blaming Justin Trudeau, the National Energy Board, and Indigenous, environmental and community groups when their own unsound grasp of global trends in demand for different types of energy is wholly at fault.
Proceed to checkout Shopify Inc., the hot e-commerce firm based in Ottawa, has come under withering fire from U.S. short seller Andrew Left, whose Citron Research (lemon, get it?) was early in warning of malfeasance at former stock-market darling Valeant Pharmaceutical International Inc., the Montreal-based drug firm.
Shopify is indeed massively overvalued for prospective investors made uncomfortable by a young firm with a $12-billion market cap and a profitless history. Shopify’s total losses over the past four money-losing years are $81 million.
But for optimistic punters, Shopify, which sets up anyone who knocks on its door as an e-commerce business, is a frisky upstart with a promising future. Yes, it has consistently lost money, but that’s the upfront cost of building an infrastructure of must-have services for its thousands of clients. Those include storage for Shopify’s clients’ payment data, apps that allow clients to integrate Shopify’s unique platform into their own, and so on.
It may be that Shopify, whose stock has soared 261per cent since its May 2015 IPO, will finally turn sustainably profitable in fiscal 2018.
Then again, having identified a lucrative niche once it turns profitable, Shopify may invite rivals who replicate its model and take market share from Shopify by underpricing the Montreal firm.
Where Left and Citron Research have got it wrong is their accusation of illegality in Shopify’s marketing practices, notably in promising prospective clients they can get rich quick and easily using Shopify services. The “messaging” that Shopify uses in recruiting mom-and-pop merchandisers hoping to establish a credible online presence is carefully worded to strongly suggest, but not guarantee, the prospect of riches as a Shopify client.
As it happens, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has already had a look at Shopify’s methods and found nothing to offend it.
Short sellers like Left are desperate to knock down a stock in order to profit from their short sale, and seldom resist the device of an accusation of illegality to further their cause. In this case, Left and Citron Research are overreaching.
The fundamentals of emergent competition and potentially saturating the market should indeed trouble Shopify investors. But this is not another miscreant Valeant bonanza for short sellers. Full disclosure: The author owns stock in TransCanada Corp.