Steep rents seeping into the suburbs

High rents aren’t just a Toronto problem. Pricey monthly payments, a feature of downtown living, are leaking into the suburbs and beyond, experts say.

For a one-bedroom in Barrie, according to PadMapper in May 2018: $1,380. In Oshawa, you’ll pay about $1,130. In Kitchener: $1,100, and in Hamilton: $1,060. And those rents are increasing, fast. In Barrie, rent for an average onebedroom is up 15 per cent from the last year. Oshawa is up 15.3 per cent, Kitchener has had a 13.4-per-cent increase and Hamilton 14 per cent.

That’s close to year-over-year increase in Toronto itself, at 15.6 per cent.

The cost of renting outside the core is still lower — renters looking for a onebedroom in Toronto will pay around $2,080 a month — but experts say rents around the GTA are rising as downtown dwellers look outward to find affordable housing.

“One of the reasons that people are moving to Hamilton is that it’s a great city and has lots to offer,” said Sara Mayo, a social planner with the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton. “But the other reason that people are moving to Hamilton is that the Toronto and surrounding area’s real estate and rental market is horrible, and people know that it’s more affordable to rent in Hamilton.”

Since 2011, Mayo says rent in Hamilton has increased — and accelerated.

“It’s not just a few years of a blip, it’s continuing to increase with no end in sight,” she said.

The Canadian Rental Housing Index, released in May, identified that issues of affordability — once confined to large urban centres — were “continuing to spill into suburban and rural areas,” said the index’s statement announcing the findings.

“The story that we see is that affordability and poverty are being pushed outside of what we would traditionally think of as being a big city problem,” Marlene Coffey, executive director of the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association, said in an interview. “And the poverty is moving into the suburbs and mid-sized communities, and in some cases smaller communities also.”

The index found that of the top five municipalities where renters paid more than 50 per cent of their income on rent, three were near Toronto: Richmond Hill, Vaughan and Markham.

Nearly half of Canadian renters are spending more than the recommended 30 per cent of income on housing, while one in five are spending over 50 per cent of their income — a crisis level, according to the index.

Mayo, who authored a recent report on Ontario’s rental housing crisis, said demand is outpacing the housing being built.

“Hamilton has generally been a low-growth community, certainly compared to GTA suburbs, but there’s been more people moving to Hamilton and there hasn’t been the housing to accommodate that,” she said.

But Mayo warns against blaming people for the province’s housing woes.

“It’s a good thing that people want to move to Hamilton,” she said. “People should be able to move to different cities across Ontario or across Canada.

“But the private sector needs to respond by building housing so the market has balance in it.”