Add $46 a year per Canadian to housing budget, cut homelessness: report

Spending an extra $46 per Canadian a year on affordable housing could dramatically reduce homelessness, reported the Hamilton Spectator Oct. 29. Existing intervention programs can only go so far if those who find a way off the streets or out of shelters can’t afford their own place to live, say researchers from York University and the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. Read full story.

Small Business Week: The potential of equity crowdfunding
Schulich’s Douglas Cumming, professor of finance and entrepreneurship, was interviewed Oct. 24 by Business News Network for Small Business Week. He discussed the prospect of equity-based crowdfunding becoming available in Canada. Ontario and other provinces are looking at changing regulations to make it viable in Canada, following the examples of Australia and a number of countries in Europe. Watch full interview.

CIS soccer: Top-ranked York Lions in OUA final four
York University, which boasts the country’s top-ranked men’s university soccer team, has been named as hosts for next year’s national championships, meaning they’ll receive an automatic berth, reported the North York Mirror Oct. 28. Read full story.

‘I did mess up’: Even the experts admit mistakes on picking a mortgage
Most of the time a variable mortgage rate does beat fixed, something pointed out in a now well-quoted study by York University Professor Moshe Milevsky who found that over 50 years floating rates saved you money about 90 per cent of the time, reported the Financial Post Oct. 28. His study didn’t include the current rate environment in which fixed rates have hovered around 3 per cent the past few years, a period when there’s been no movement on the variable rate. Read full story.

Expo 67: The birthplace of modern moviegoing
Cinema screens can be seven stories high. Some of the biggest blockbusters of the past decade have been shown in 3D. We’re as likely to watch a movie in a car or on a plane as in a theatre. We take these facts for granted, reported Concordia University Oct. 28. But according to Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67, a new book edited by researchers from Concordia University and York University, and published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, their existence is thanks in part to film innovation at Montreal’s Expo 67. Read full story.

Great horned owls and Halloween
Straddling the line between life and death, summer and winter, Halloween can be traced back more than 2,000 years to the Celtic festival of Samhain. Samhain is popularly thought to have been a time for communing with the dead, when the veil that separates the living from the dead is lifted and spirits can cross over into the land of the living. However, according to York University history Professor Nicholas Rogers, it is more likely that Samhain was closer to a harvest festival, concerned with preparing for winter and the death of the land, reported Seacoastonline.com Oct. 28. Read full story.

Bond would be shield in new financial storms
Schulich School of Business financial services Professor Gordon Roberts said the latest measure to protect the world’s banking system is part of the re-regulation taking place in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, after deregulation in various jurisdictions including the United States and Europe was identified as a major cause of the global economic disruption. “The idea is to try to set up a capital system that will prevent the need for bail-outs by taxpayers,” said Roberts in the Bottom Line’s mid-October 2014 issue. Read full story.