The “golden horseshoe” which extends from downtown Toronto around Lake Ontario down to Niagara Falls is not only the most densely populated area in Canada, it’s also the most common destination for new immigrants to the country. In recent years, so many people have moved here (including Canadians from other provinces) that for a variety of reasons our housing market has been unable to keep up.
Because there aren’t enough places to go around, prices keep increasing. While some become millionaires on paper, others keep losing their homes as wealth becomes further consolidated. It’s a complex situation without simple solutions, but if one thing is clear to everyone it’s that the current surge in real estate valuation is becoming unsustainable. The big question is, what comes next for Ontario?
In this post I’ll try to put together information that will hopefully be useful to folks curious about moving here, but first (as we did with health care costs) I think it may be valuable to share our from own personal experience…because recently we faced some pandemic-fueled housing insecurity ourselves.
In early March, our landlord called me out of the blue one morning to tell us he was selling our townhouse. It was a complete surprise, and quite a shock in the middle of a pandemic.
While we knew we were essentially living in what was always intended to be an investment vehicle for him, we’d pretty clearly explained our intentions to each other when we moved from downtown two years ago. He knew we needed to be located close to our elementary school while our kids were small. While one of our munchkins is in French Immersion, the other is still in kindergarten, and those school district boundaries differ. He knew we intended to stay in one place while we saved up a down payment to perhaps buy our own house. When we signed our lease, he was actually quite relieved we intended to stick around for a few years, because his previous tenants hadn’t stayed very long and this would be easier for him. Communications between us had always been smooth, and it had always seemed like we were on the same page. He was planning to retire at some point after we’d moved on.
Then COVID-19 happened, and a lot of things changed.
Our landlord wasn’t a major real estate investor like the person we’d rented our initial downtown condo from (who owned over a dozen residential and professional properties). He was just a regular dude, from neighbouring Hamilton, who ran a small business. During the pandemic, his finances changed dramatically. Facing dwindling income and unable to hire more help, he was forced to shutter his shop. This pushed him into a position of needing to retire early, and cashing out the townhouse we’d been renting was essential toward doing so. I can’t really blame him for what happened, I just wish he’d contacted us sooner about all of it, when he might have been able to be more flexible.
Instead, one day in March I woke up thinking everything was fine, fed the kids and helped them get ready for school, and then by lunchtime I was dealing with a notification that we needed to clear out in sixty days or less…which wasn’t even the end of the academic year. To make matters worse, this was just as Ontario’s third wave of COVID-19 infections was taking off, with newer and more communicable variants, and I wasn’t even half-vaccinated yet. How was I supposed to find a new place in the middle of all that and then safely relocate us? It was nerve wracking enough just picking up groceries.
I have to admit, that was one emotional phone call.
Fortunately, this story has a happy ending, including giggling children running around in a huge grassy yard while their mom sips coffee and works remotely from a comfy chair on a sunny balcony. We were almost unbelievably lucky. First of all, we have incredible friends and within hours of that phone call I not only had realtor recommendations and detailed legal advice (spoiler alert: tenant protections here are amazing) but also multiple families had offered us temporary housing! Second, while nearly every immediately available rental option in town was too small or too far from our school, there was one unit opening up at just the right time, in a brand new complex that could be perfect, and within two days of filling out an application were able to sign a new lease on it. Whew. Then “all” we had to do was arrange an emergency relocation in the middle of the province shutting down…but at least we knew where we were going. The next several weeks were exhausting, but not nearly as intense as they could have been.
Of course we could have camped out in an Airbnb while we figured things out, or I could have dug in our heels and geared up for a protracted legal battle, relying on eviction freezes and legal tactics to run out the clock, but knowing I wouldn’t have to think about any of that was such an incredible relief. I can’t say thank you enough to our wonderful community for all the kindness we received as this unfolded.
I heard from friends day and night checking in to see how we were doing. The leasing agent and property manager at the new place were infinitely patient with all my questions and concerns. Every single person we dealt with, from the moving company to the self-storage facility to each random buyer who answered a kijiji ad for our extra stuff was so warm and caring and flexible, it was all downright inspiring. I even met one guy, who came to buy our sleeper sofa, who had also immigrated from the states in recent years and had even lived in Virginia while working for the same company I used to…talk about a small world. I wish everyone who helped us these past months could have seen how wide my smile was over the phone or under my face mask during all those interactions.
Today is literally the first moment I’ve had a chance to sit down and write about any of this, because while we’ve been unpacking in our new digs for a couple weeks now, yesterday was the first time I finally had a tiny new desk to set my computer on. Overall, we really couldn’t possibly have been more fortunate with how things turned out. We’re now in an all-rental complex that won’t be selling itself off or going condo anytime soon. The kids love their new yard, shared among all the neighbouring townhouse units. While we have a little less space it’s laid out a lot better for us, so now I have a larger more functional kitchen and the munchkins have a bigger bedroom. We don’t have a private garage, but we do have secure bike storage and our parking spots make it much easier to swap our cars around compared to our old skinny driveway. From a geeky perspective, we’re in paradise now because the new digs also have fibre-to-the-premises but with even cheaper and faster ISP packages than before. Sure we’ve been a little frustrated trying to shop for furniture and necessities during another provincial lockdown and amidst the cargo delays caused by the recent Suez canal crisis, but overall these are very privileged problems to have compared to what most families are dealing with.
So while we dodged this particular problem, you might ask what’s going on with southern Ontario’s real estate, that we’ve been here for four years now and are still actively saving for a down payment on our own place? It just so happens that TVO’s excellent program The Agenda with Steve Paikin recently did a great summary of the past decade’s trends with an economist. If you prefer to listen in podcast form, I’ll clip out the charts they reference about halfway through the episode.
Do you remember that Sesame Street song that goes “one of these things…
…is not like the other?” 🎶
There simply isn’t enough housing supply to meet demand here right now and countermeasures like penalties for vacant properties and taxes on foreign ownership only have so much influence. Nobody wants to call a bubble a bubble until it pops…so right now the political reality is that almost as many people are riding high on the selling side of things as are struggling to buy (but there are tremendous socio-economic and generational divides between those groups). Needless to say, between all this and COVID-19, the next provincial election is going to be interesting.
Looking toward next year and beyond, the big question we need to ask ourselves is, now that we’re in stable shape again what do we want to do with ourselves as we hopefully exit the pandemic and become potential homebuyers? Do we really want a house, or would we rather live in a high rise condo? If the suburbs are becoming just as expensive to live in as some pretty nice parts of Toronto (especially when you factor other cost of living differences, like fuelling and insuring cars) do we want to consider the big city if career opportunities present themselves there, or are we way too much in love with our ‘burb where we’re comfortable and have been embraced by such a wonderful community?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether we even want to own real estate at all at this point, or if we might we just consider renting for life, purposefully? There’s an argument to be made that one root cause of the GTA’s current predicament is just “growing pains” as it inevitably evolves to be more like Manhattan, London, Paris, or Hong Kong where renting has been a normalized part of urban life for generations. How different would things be here if there were a lot more purpose-built rentals around, like the one we just comfortably landed in?
However we end up answering any of these questions, for the time being it helps immensely that when I look out my bedroom window now, I can see right to the train station and if things go well, it won’t be all that much longer before we can leave town occasionally and begin to travel again…to Toronto and beyond (right before everything went sideways last year, we’d been preparing to explore Quebec and the Maritimes). Burlington is a great town, but when you spend the better part of a year within a kilometre of your mailbox, time slows to a crawl and anyplace can start to feel a bit claustrophobic.
Speaking of time, some rather huge milestones have passed while we’ve been juggling our housing dilemma, not the least of which worth mentioning is that we’ve now been here long enough to become eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship! While the pandemic has created some unique challenges and introduced quite a bit of processing delay, we intend to submit our application packages very soon, and if all goes well some months from now we should be able to sit for our citizenship exams. In other good news most of the adults in our extended family are now fully vaccinated, including both our sets of parents, and I’ve recently had my first dose myself. These developments have had a profound effect on morale up here, as our family contends with the present and contemplates the future.
Whatever the months ahead entail, we certainly hope life will start to get a little less challenging and return to some form of normalcy…in the meantime everyone stay safe out there. Now that I’m plugged back in, hopefully I’ll be able to share more of our adventure soon.
This Ontarian Life 