City aims to match seniors, millennials needing housing
Program designed to address loneliness, affordability issues
GILBERT NGABO Elizabeth Hill will never forget the minor incident that might have cost her her life, if it wasn’t for the help of a newcomer student she was housing.
She had just returned home from walking her dog when she suddenly felt very weak and collapsed on the floor.
“So I looked up at the ceiling and I remember thinking, I’m in my 70s and you don’t know what a heart attack looks like or a stroke or something,” Hill, now 75, said of the incident about five years ago.
She had been renting out her west-end Toronto home on and off, since her husband died about 20 years ago, to help pay her bills.
Ayoung man from Brazil, one of several young people she’s housed over the years, was renting a room while he studied English.
Fearing the worst, she mustered enough energy to call for him, and mimicked instructions to go to the phone and dial 911.
An ambulance came and it turned out she’d had an allergic reaction to a wasp sting.
“He had only two weeks of English in Toronto, but that young man saved my life,” she said. Since then, she says she tries to continuously share part of her house with young people in need of a place to stay. TARA DESCHAMPS Monica Martins and her husband had been looking for a house for nine months by the time they fell in love with a “character home” in Toronto’s east end.
With demand for properties high and bidding wars the norm, they knew getting the home wouldn’t be easy, so to convince the seller to choose their offer, they decided to go beyond simply digging deep into their bank account.
Despite her husband’s doubts that it would carry much weight, Martins put a pen to paper and scrawled a note that described her family, detailed how much they adored the home, and noted that she and the sellers had shared tastes in books and furniture.
She also included an informal commitment not to gut or demolish the place, as had been done to another property down the street.
“If you pick us, we will make it our own over the years, but we love the house that you’ve loved so dearly and would love to live in it and raise our family in it,” Martins recalled writing, before tucking in a photo of the family, complete with her daughter and dog, and leaving the note with her realtor.
The note placed the Martins in a growing group of Canadian buyers who are opting for the personal touch in hopes of gaining an edge in heated markets — and realtors and sellers say such missives often do the trick.
continued on continued on