Investment

Downtown decay: Greater investment needed to reverse decline

Published

1 year ago

May 29, 2023

In Part 3 of its Downtown Decay series, CTV News Toronto examines the path forward for the city’s slumping core—and what can be done to reverse the troubling trend.

It is lunch hour in Toronto’s core, and the Front Street patio tables are set. It’s midweek, it’s May, and the skies are clear—but the office crowd is scarce, and the chairs sit empty.

It’s a tell-tale sign that fewer people are downtown these days, with plenty of reasons to avoid the area.

“Transportation has been a hot mess,” said Jay Daye, who lives downtown. “It has been a struggle to get around.”

“I have never seen this much construction at a single time,” said Akash Thomas, who moved here from India three years ago.

Improving the commute into the core, and the ease with which people can move around within it, is key to revitalizing a slumping city centre, said Matti Siemiatycki, director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities.

A ‘for sale’ sign in the window of a commercial building in downtown Toronto. (CTV News Toronto)

“It’s just like a litany of transportation challenges in that area, to the point where politicians are in some cases saying ‘Don’t come into downtown,’ which is the opposite of what we need right now,” he said.

“We’re talking about a downtown core that is struggling, and needs huge numbers of people to come in and out, and be able to do that easily.”

With activity levels at just 47 per cent of what they were in the core pre-pandemic, the data suggests a downtown decline spurred by a lockdown-led drop in the nine-to-five office crowd. But with hybrid and remote work here to stay in at least some capacity, some experts suggest reorganizing the role of Toronto’s core in the city’s economy.

“If you’re not able to attract people to work, attract people for amenities,” said William Strange, who teaches urban economics at the University of Toronto. “The stronger are the amenities, the happier people are going to be to go into their office anyway.”

“What I see is a huge opportunity for downtown Toronto to remake itself,” Karen Chapple, director of the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, told CTV News Toronto.

The key, she said, would be to reinvent the area as a mixed-use community, a model other urban centres have demonstrated to be successful.

“What I just hope, though, as we’re attracting sectors back, is that they are not nine-to-five sectors, because that’s what killed some of these downtowns.”

People passing by an empty patio on a sunny day in downtown Toronto. (CTV News Toronto)

The revitalization of the core will be a critical challenge for the city’s next mayor, Siemiatycki said, who warned service cuts could worsen an already-spiralling problem.

But investment won’t be possible without a rethink of the city’s fiscal framework, according to Matt Elliott, publisher of City Hall Watcher.

“If you look at the city’s budget hole and you say, ‘We’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing,’ and you’re not going to have a real plan to fill that budget hole, that gets into some really dicey territory,” Elliott said. “Because that’s when you start looking at really deep cuts.”

It’s not ideology, he said—it’s math.

“I don’t think we’ve realized that we’ve fallen down this ladder in terms of our prosperity,” Giles Gherson, incoming Toronto Region Board of Trade president, told CTV News Toronto.

Gherson warned that without a new financial deal for the city, which heavily supports services that should be the responsibility of Ottawa and the province, Toronto’s downtown would fall further behind.

“We’re poor,” he said. “We’re a poorer place than we used to be.”

The core, he argued, is in need of a correction, if the city is to salvage its productivity, maintain job growth, and remain competitive globally.

“We haven’t been paying attention,” he said. “We’ve been sleeping, and it’s falling off. So that’s what we need to fix—and that’s a big deal.”

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Investment

Tesla shares soar more than 14% as Trump win is seen boosting Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company

Published

7 days ago

November 6, 2024

Anne Joseph

NEW YORK (AP) — Shares of Tesla soared Wednesday as investors bet that the electric vehicle maker and its CEO Elon Musk will benefit from Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Tesla stands to make significant gains under a Trump administration with the threat of diminished subsidies for alternative energy and electric vehicles doing the most harm to smaller competitors. Trump’s plans for extensive tariffs on Chinese imports make it less likely that Chinese EVs will be sold in bulk in the U.S. anytime soon.

“Tesla has the scale and scope that is unmatched,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, in a note to investors. “This dynamic could give Musk and Tesla a clear competitive advantage in a non-EV subsidy environment, coupled by likely higher China tariffs that would continue to push away cheaper Chinese EV players.”

Tesla shares jumped 14.8% Wednesday while shares of rival electric vehicle makers tumbled. Nio, based in Shanghai, fell 5.3%. Shares of electric truck maker Rivian dropped 8.3% and Lucid Group fell 5.3%.

Tesla dominates sales of electric vehicles in the U.S, with 48.9% in market share through the middle of 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Subsidies for clean energy are part of the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022. It included tax credits for manufacturing, along with tax credits for consumers of electric vehicles.

Musk was one of Trump’s biggest donors, spending at least $119 million mobilizing Trump’s supporters to back the Republican nominee. He also pledged to give away $1 million a day to voters signing a petition for his political action committee.

In some ways, it has been a rocky year for Tesla, with sales and profit declining through the first half of the year. Profit did rise 17.3% in the third quarter.

The U.S. opened an investigation into the company’s “Full Self-Driving” system after reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian. The investigation covers roughly 2.4 million Teslas from the 2016 through 2024 model years.

And investors sent company shares tumbling last month after Tesla unveiled its long-awaited robotaxi at a Hollywood studio Thursday night, seeing not much progress at Tesla on autonomous vehicles while other companies have been making notable progress.

Tesla began selling the software, which is called “Full Self-Driving,” nine years ago. But there are doubts about its reliability.

The stock is now showing a 16.1% gain for the year after rising the past two days.

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Investment

S&P/TSX composite up more than 100 points, U.S. stock markets mixed

Published

4 weeks ago

October 16, 2024

Anne Joseph

TORONTO – Canada’s main stock index was up more than 100 points in late-morning trading, helped by strength in base metal and utility stocks, while U.S. stock markets were mixed.

The S&P/TSX composite index was up 103.40 points at 24,542.48.

In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 192.31 points at 42,932.73. The S&P 500 index was up 7.14 points at 5,822.40, while the Nasdaq composite was down 9.03 points at 18,306.56.

The Canadian dollar traded for 72.61 cents US compared with 72.44 cents US on Tuesday.

The November crude oil contract was down 71 cents at US$69.87 per barrel and the November natural gas contract was down eight cents at US$2.42 per mmBTU.

The December gold contract was up US$7.20 at US$2,686.10 an ounce and the December copper contract was up a penny at US$4.35 a pound.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 16, 2024.

Companies in this story: (TSX:GSPTSE, TSX:CADUSD)

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Economy

S&P/TSX up more than 200 points, U.S. markets also higher

Published

1 month ago

October 11, 2024

Anne Joseph

TORONTO – Canada’s main stock index was up more than 200 points in late-morning trading, while U.S. stock markets were also headed higher.

The S&P/TSX composite index was up 205.86 points at 24,508.12.

In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 336.62 points at 42,790.74. The S&P 500 index was up 34.19 points at 5,814.24, while the Nasdaq composite was up 60.27 points at 18.342.32.

The Canadian dollar traded for 72.61 cents US compared with 72.71 cents US on Thursday.

The November crude oil contract was down 15 cents at US$75.70 per barrel and the November natural gas contract was down two cents at US$2.65 per mmBTU.

The December gold contract was down US$29.60 at US$2,668.90 an ounce and the December copper contract was up four cents at US$4.47 a pound.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 11, 2024.

Companies in this story: (TSX:GSPTSE, TSX:CADUSD)

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