CITY COUNCIL
• An end to the war on pets? [The Star]
• Super Mayor’s Marvel comic version of budget exploits is missing a few panels [Globe & Mail]
• City may scrap pet licences [Globe & Mail]
• Toronto’s licensing division needs cash boost [The Sun]
• Clueless in T.O. [Now Weekly]
• Burn after reading [Now Weekly]
GTA POLITICS
• Councillors compare leaked memo to Wikileaks [The Star]
• Mississauga councillors call for investigation into leaked memos [National Post]
TRANSIT
• TTC delays cutting bus service [The Star]
• James: TTC choking on its success [The Star]
• Twitter’s TTCUpdates goes out of service [The Star]
• The TTC is a social service not a business, right? [National Post]
• TTC puts off decision on bus route cutbacks [National Post]
• TTC delays plan to reduce hours, erases $1-million in potential savings [Globe & Mail]
• TTC defers decision to cut bus routes [The Sun]
• TTC funding gap still not closed [The Sun]
• Levy: Job not done with the TTC [The Sun]
• TTC bus service cuts would leave riders stranded, they say [OpenFile]
CRIME & POLICE
• Officer killed, driver shot in stolen snowplow ‘rampage’ [The Star]
• Slain officer remembered for passion and sunny disposition [The Star]
• G20 news conference cancelled out of respect for fallen officer [The Star]
• Critics question wisdom of deferred police hiring [The Star]
• Fallen in the line of duty [The Star]
• DiManno: Suddenly a police call turns deadly [The Star]
• Police watchdog considers reopening G20 case [Globe & Mail]
• Toronto loses a ‘hero’ as police officer killed [Globe & Mail]
• Toronto police officer killed after stolen snowplow chase [National Post]
• Joe O’Connor: Death tragic reminder of what it means to be a police officer [National Post]
• Timeline: Toronto-area officers killed in the line of duty [National Post]
• Officer killed by stolen snow plow [The Sun]
• Plow owner tries to stop ‘mad man’ [The Sun]
• Ford’s statement on officer’s death [The Sun]
• Too high a price to pay [The Sun]
• Police Budget: A Bitter Tonic [Now Weekly]
CLUB DISTRICT
• What killed the club district? [Now Weekly]
• Number crunch [Now Weekly]
• http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=178712 [Now Weekly]
• So long, Jersey Shore north [Now Weekly]
• On Adam Vaughan’s Dance card [Now Weekly]
• Dangers in District master plan [Now Weekly]
• Where do we go from here? [Now Weekly]
BUILDING
• Loblaw ready to tear down historic warehouse [The Star]
ROADS
• The Fixer: Road crews ready to tamp down on potholes [The Star]
• Durham residents fuming over plan to build ‘half a highway’ [The Star]
• Skymeter: the future of road tolls in Toronto? [Eye Weekly]
OTHER NEWS
• The 1856 panorama of Toronto [BlogTO]
• The Great Torontoist Pun Hunt: North [Torontoist]
• Scene: Three Hours in the Epic Journey of the Beer Vats [Torontoist]
4 comments
I would consider this a 5-star headline for issues of downtown retailing and urban sprawl, and not just because I shop at Target constantly and have worked with their corporate design teams on store renovations:
Target to open more than 100 Canadian stores [The Star]
The sale of Zellers (pretty much) to Target is going to have a big impact on the landscape. Target has a lot of cash and will now probably throw a lot of money into building new stores to replace the dowdy, too-small Zellers they are temporarily inheriting, much as Wal-Mart eventually tossed aside most of the Woolworths that were their initial entry into Canada.
Look for:
– downtown urban shopping centres anchored by Zellers, a pretty weak draw, to now do better. Target is far more amenable than Wal-Mart to operating in dense urban downtowns and does very well with their urban stores in New York, Minneapolis and other locations. They give big bucks to local charities, schools, etc. also.
– suburban mall Zellers to probably survive as they should be large enough or adaptable enough to convert into true prototypical Target footprints.
– older, small-town Zellers to be thrown out as soon as RioCan et. al can build a bigger, fancier store at the next highway exit. You are going to be looking at a lot of empty boxes to try to reuse in places like Orillia, Lindsay and Cobourg. Going to be a blight issue if not handled well.
– Groceries? Targets in the US sell a fair bit of off-site packaged produce, meat, milk and other grocery basics (though not full supermarkets) as per a recent renovation program called “p-fresh”. I don’t know if they will try this game in Canada, where supermarkets are still very strong and dairy price controls limit competitiveness. Probably too much to bite off, at least initially.
– solar panels and other green features. Target is pretty good on this front and if the right incentives are there from government, will play ball on certain enviro aspects.
If Target takes an aggressive route, keeping many urban Zellers and going into new condos and other tight sites with a little more flexibility than Wal-Mart does, it will be good for Canadian cities. If they stick to bottom-line formula and treat the whole country like it is Florida, the eventual replacement of all those Zellers stores with more edge-city sprawl will be a disaster. Hope for the best.
Giant Tiger has a good business model of taking over empty boxes in smaller centres that have been vacated by the previous tenants for fancier, larger, newer digs. If small-town Zellers are replaced by GTs, it will work well. They are several steps up from dollar stores, but a step or two down from Wal-Mart and Zellers – a good niche.
Cycling along Barclays Cycle Superhighways is on the up http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/17912.aspx
“New figures show that the number of cyclists along the first two Barclays Cycle Superhighway routes, which run from Merton to the City and Barking to Tower Gateway, has risen by 70 per cent with increases of 100 per cent or more seen on some sections during peak hours”………
ISkyscraper: I was in Target stores in LA and Brooklyn – the one in Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway node, isn’t a bad example of an urban store, neither was the one in LA off Santa Monica Blvd (a city that’s more urban than made out to be).
Zellers has some stores like that here – the old Eaton’s Stores that Zellers took over in 1999/2000 – Square One, Bramalea City Centre, etc, work okay on two levels. Wal-Mart of all places has two-storey stores because of Woolco stores in denser Canadian malls like Scarborough Town Centre and Square One.
I am convinced that Target can and hopefully operate in an urban setting. I can’t see it abandoning markets like central Montreal (where the “Tar-jay” pronunciation works – Zellers has a semi-urban store at Place Alexis-Nihon near the old Forum), Toronto and Vancouver.
But I am also convinced you are correct about the smaller city sprawl – Wal-Mart and its developer partner, “SmartCentres”, have done the same in Orillia, Woodstock, etc.