The Great Covid Life Swap
Torontonians never loved summer as intensely as we did this year. We relished every backyard cocktail, park hangout, patio date and lakeside visit. For a couple of months, when new Covid-19 cases were low and the city had settled into Stage 3, things almost seemed normal. We got haircuts, went to the dentist, ate inside at restaurants. I did things over the summer that seemed unimaginable back in the spring: I sent my daughter to day camps, went on road trips with my family and, most meaningfully, saw my parents again, in real life, hugging them for the first time in months.
Now fall has arrived and there’s profound apprehension about the cold weather ahead. Torontonians are buying fire pits and propane heaters for their backyards, stationary bikes for their basements and high-end desk chairs for their home offices.
Others, meanwhile, have taken more dramatic steps. A neighbour of mine with two small kids was so worried about a second wave that he and his wife packed up and moved to Vancouver so they could bubble with her parents. Another friend had so little confidence in the TDSB’s ability to educate her son this year that she and her husband moved to a small town to send their kid to an affordable private school.
This month, our cover package is all about the radical lifestyle changes Torontonians are making in response to these extraordinary circumstances (“Covid Made Me Do It,” page 51). Originally, we set out to answer the question so many of us are asking: given the precarious state of our economy and record-high unemployment, why is the Toronto property market still going so strong? In August, there was a 20 per cent increase in the average house price in the GTA compared to the same month last year. Why are there still bidding wars and bully bids and houses going for hundreds of thousands over asking?
In the process of researching Toronto’s booming market, we heard one crazy story after another. The pandemic is making people do things they wouldn’t have dreamed of a year ago. For Torontonians
who can work from a laptop, this extraordinary moment presented an opportunity for change. We began to understand why there are so many properties swapping hands. As our cover story illustrates, people are upsizing, downsizing, moving into the city for the first time, and moving out of the city forever.
My own unscientific analysis of Toronto’s surging real estate prices comes from the conversations I had this summer and early fall with my American friends. Their country is collapsing, and Canada has never looked so safe or so sane. Even in a pandemic—or maybe especially in a pandemic—Canada has proven itself to be a well-run democracy when many others are under threat. And the more Trump limits immigration to the U.S., the more attractive Canada becomes. When you buy property in Toronto, the value proposition reaches far beyond the square footage.
But let’s not get overconfident. We aren’t immune from trouble. Most other countries that got Covid under control experienced a dramatic uptick in cases when stores, restaurants and gyms reopened, kids returned to school, and people relaxed their distancing. This month, we’re publishing an intimate account of one Covid case from back in the spring (“Life and Death in the ICU,” page 74) that serves as a reminder of how punishing the virus can be.
—Sarah Fulford Email: editor@torontolife.com Twitter: @sarah_ fulford