Leaps of faith
Relocating to a new city during a pandemic brings unique challenges
Andrew Dodds moved from Waterloo to Toronto last year, joining partner Lauren Podmore. He doesn’t regret the move, even if — as for many others — his new city “adventure” is temporarily on hold.
For 11 months, Canadians have been counselled to stay home. But given the time and stillness to reflect what they want from a home, many have found the pandemic has nudged them to change their surroundings.
Much has been written about the outflow of Torontonians seeking more space indoors and out in the suburbs and secondary centres. Housing experts say COVID-19 has accelerated a trend that was underway before the pandemic and the tide away from big cities isn’t unique to Toronto — it’s happening around the world.
Statistics Canada reports that between July 1, 2019, and July 1, 2020, 50,375 more people moved out of Toronto than ar- rived from other parts of Ontario, even though the city’s population continues to grow overall.
In fact, the real estate market inside the city’s borders saw a 52.4 per cent year-over-year jump in resale home transactions last month. Even the condo market, which sagged through the summer and early fall, showed an 85.5 per cent annual increase in sales in January, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board.
What motivates so many people to move during a pandemic? The Star asked four about their choices. None regretted the decision to relocate, but each one reported that, for now at least, there’s no getting away from the challenges of the pandemic.
Alberta bound
If it weren’t for COVID-19, Lauren McCreery isn’t sure she would be preparing to move next month to Canmore, Alta.
“I think I would have just kept dreaming about it,” she said. “Something about this past year has caused me to reflect on how short life is.”
Like a lot of people, McCreery, 33, wants to live a healthy life. But COVID has given her time to reflect on whether her choices are aligned with that goal.
She is open about the loneliness of living through a pandemic as a single person in downtown Toronto with her rescue dog Finley as her main companion. And the gratitude she feels about being able to retain her job working from home didn’t prevent her downtown apartment from becoming claustrophobic.
“It you live in Toronto there are so many people around you, it’s amazing how lonely you can feel,” she said.
McCreery struggles to describe what it is about Canmore that has stolen her heart. She first experienced the Rocky Mountain ski town about an hour from Calgary on a road trip with a friend in 2016. The attraction was instant and she has returned about twice a year since.
She wonders if she will lose her awe of the mountains after she has been there for a while.
McCreery has signed a lease on a Canmore apartment, taken a year’s unpaid leave from her job here, sold her stuff and in November, moved back to her parents’ Oakville home to await a March 15 flight west.
Although she has close friends in Alberta, she expects her new life will be lonely sometimes in the beginning. She expects her heart will know within a year whether she should stay.
“We’ll have to see what kind of life I can build so I can sustain a lifestyle in Canmore,” she said.
Back to the Beach
Kevin Bellefountain, wife Cheryl Thompson and Channing, their Portuguese Water Dog, have moved three times since 2018 — twice during the pandemic.
Now, they are back where they started, packing a deeper appreciation of Toronto and the beloved Beach neighbourhood they once thought they were ready to leave behind.
They were due for a change — that’s how Bellefountain, 56, describes the couple’s decision to sell their home in the Beach north of Queen Street East after nearly 20 years.
Initially they stayed close, renting a condo across from Kew Gardens Park on Queen Street.
“It was probably one of the most liberating things we’d ever done — just letting go and being a renter,” Bellefountain said.
But in August 2019, they bought a house in Ottawa and began dividing their time between the two cities before moving to the capital full time in June 2020.
They chose Ottawa’s Westboro Village, a cozy neighbourhood like the Beach, a short stroll to the Ottawa River. But the atmosphere was distinctly different.
“We could not crack a smile off anybody. We could not even engage in a ‘Good morning,’ and we have a dog,” he said. “We just weren’t even going out. We let the dog out in the back yard and walked when we had to, but it was like, ‘Ah what’s the point?’
“People would argue it was the pandemic, but we were there before the pandemic.”
At the end of August, Cheryl said, “I’m just not going to do this. I’m not going to invest this much time in a city that is so cold.”
In September, they sold the house for the full asking price after the first showing. They were just signing the papers when a friend called to say there was a condo for sale in the building where they had rented. By 10 p.m., they’d bought it.
Fourteen weeks later, the same company that moved them to Ottawa brought them back to the Beach.
Moving in a pandemic is stressful. “You’re hiring movers to come in your house. They overnight in a hotel. You’re very concerned they’re being safe and they’re observing all protocols,” said Bellefountain.
But, he said, “moving back to the Beach has been a great experience. It’s not just the Beach, it’s Toronto. Toronto’s friendlier than Ottawa. It’s just a much more open, available city.”
In the end, it was enough change. Their old house felt like suburbia compared with the urban vibe of Queen Street only six blocks away, said Bellefountain.
“We’re fortunate we live in a neighbourhood that is fairly outgoing and gregarious. We can be out for four hours and have 20 different conversations.”
Connecting to Cobourg
Buying a home can be scary at the best of times, but Bonnie Wex put in an offer on a condo in Cobourg last March, the day the province went into the first COVID-19 lockdown.
“Unlike this time, you didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know if I was going to close (on the condo purchase),” she said.
But financial sense overtook fear. Wex, 61, had been renting near Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue for six years at a cost of $1,900 a month plus utilities. “For 5-⁄ years it was 10 hours 1
2 a day of constant construction,” she said. “It was horrific.”
Approaching retirement age, she figured it was time to buy.
She didn’t want to live in a suburb, so she drew a circle on the map within one and a half hours of Toronto where Wex has many friends. She couldn’t afford to move north or west of the city so she started hunting east.
Wex discovered a bargain in “one of the ugliest buildings in Cobourg.” A builder was redeveloping the property, taking the apartments back down to the studs. For less than $300,000, she could buy a onebedroom-plus-den apartment on the second floor and she was able to make some minor modifications to the floorplan.
There is no elevator or balcony. But the condo is a short walk to Lake Ontario and Cobourg’s pretty downtown so Wex wouldn’t have to drive to pick up milk. The town also had large seniors’ and artistic communities, which appealed to Wex, who was looking to forge some social connections.
In the end, she did close on the condo and moved to Cobourg in late September.
It should have been perfect, but the pandemic has made it impossible to connect with the community.
“There were groups that I was going to join — a walking group, there’s a trail group,” she said. She wanted to start a “deep dive” dinner club that would gather strangers to debate timely topics over a meal.
“All it takes is to connect with one person,” Wex said.
She doesn’t know if Cobourg will work out in the long term.
“I may end up going farther east,” she said.
“I only have doubts because (the pandemic) is going to be so long. I will conceivably be here a year and a half before I can do anything. I fear I will have already formed an opinion, but it’s not fair.”
Turning to Toronto
Andrew Dodds is originally from Ottawa, but after finishing his engineering studies at the University of Waterloo in 2011, he moved around mostly in the Kitchener-Waterloo area where he eventually found a job in his field of automation design.
Once outside the campus bubble, he connected with the arts and activist communities, helping in the push to bring the LRT to Kitchener.
“I’d tell people — Waterloo Region was big enough for things to matter but small enough for you to matter in them,” he said.
When a job opened up in Toronto last year, Dodds, 34, was drawn to the challenges of a bigger city. Initially he hesitated because of the pandemic. But with friends, family and partner Lauren Podmore living in Toronto, he decided to make the leap.
The first challenge he encountered was finding suitable housing. Podmore was renting a small apartment from a company that was breaking every rule in the residential tenancies act, according to Dodds.
“I started looking (for a place) in July and was hoping for there to be a bigger drop in some of the rental prices,” he said. “The prices are pretty egregious.”
They wanted a space where they could both work comfortably from home.
In September, he and Podmore finally rented two floors of a duplex in Riverdale. It turned out to be a dozen doors down from Dodds’s treasured uncles — the people who bought him his first beer in Greektown when he was starting university.
Unfortunately, the pandemic prompted his uncles to sell up and move to Nova Scotia. That and the outflow of friends due to COVID-19 is understandable, but disappointing, said Dodds, who describes himself as the kind of guy that likes to get to know the local merchants and organize a slo-pitch and hockey league at work.
He would have liked to buy his uncles’ place, but he couldn’t afford it.
“I couldn’t quite come up with the seven figures it would have taken to keep the place in the family they’d had for 30 years and all the experiences and memories they had there.”
Dodds says the generational housing gulf in Toronto is unsustainable. He thinks the city needs to accept more density, more affordable housing and encourage environmentally friendly development.
“We’ve spent a century building the most expensive and thorough transportation system in the country underneath Bloor-Danforth,” he said. “But we can’t imagine more than two or three storeys on top of it.”
Dodds doesn’t regret moving. But, he said, “right now, it’s like moving was pulling back the slingshot of a whole new adventure. I’ve been holding that slingshot for a year and I think my arm is going to be holding it another year longer before I really get to launch myself.”
“Something about this past year has caused me to reflect on how short life is.” LAUREN MCCREERY