Own in Toronto, live in New York
‘The New York market is volatile; I could lose my shirt, and it’s the only shirt I have’
Over Christmas a few weeks ago, my partner, Jennifer, and I spent 10 days at a friend’s apartment in New York City while our friend, a Canadian, was visiting family in southern Ontario. For part of his visit home, he stayed in the tiny apartment he maintains in the basement of a large house on Palmerston Ave., which he owns.
That’s right, our friend Gerry Oxford, owns a home in Toronto. But a career opportunity brought him to New York City, where he rents a well-maintained, spacious onebedroom apartment while acting as a landlord-from-afar to the tenants staying in his house, which is subdivided into three apartments.
Owning property in one place and renting somewhere else isn’t unusual. (In fact, one of Oxford’s tenants owns property in Prince Edward Country and rents in Toronto.) We probably most often hear of “snowbirds” — Canadians who own a home in Canada but either rent (or sometimes own) a property in a southern part of the U.S., like Florida or Arizona. But Oxford is among the many thousands of Canadian citizens working abroad, although it’s hard to pinpoint a statistic on how many maintain a Canadian residence as well.
So Oxford, a systems analyst and developer, is what we might call a Cross-border Renter.
“I’m not a ‘property person,’ ” says Oxford, sitting in his living room where one window overlooks the Empire State Building and from another you can see the top of the Chrysler Building. “I don’t dream of buying houses, renovating them, tending to gardens. Owning a home is exhausting. But I saw owning one as a source of financial equity.”
In 2000, having worked for a number of years integrating new software systems and handling data management mainly for non-profits and universities, a friend told Oxford about a job opportunity in New York City. He won a five-week contract as a software developer at the United Nations and ended up staying with the organization for five years.
At the time, a friend both lived in and ran a number of companies out of a 4,000-square-foot loft at West 19th St. and Park Ave. There was a spare bedroom so Oxford temporarily moved in and ended up living there for eight years, even after the UN contract ended in 2005. At that time, Oxford had grown to like living in NYC — and was in a relationship — so he became a consultant, gradually developing a roster of not-for-profit clients. In 2008, he moved out of the loft and into his present apartment in a modern midrise at the southern end of Murray Hill. He was lucky to find it relatively easily and quickly, considering the vacancy rate in Manhattan hovers around 1 per cent. And given that the current average monthly rent for a onebedroom in buildings without a doorman is $2,962, Oxford’s unit, at 650-square-feet with hardwood floors and two balconies, is a deal at $2,320. He furnished it rather quickly by buying a few things off Craigslist and picking up castoffs from people moving out of his boyfriend’s building. “Except the bed,” says Oxford with a laugh. “Everyone in New York knows you get your bed from Macy’s.” Today he’s set up his business in such a way that he can do a lot of it remotely and control his time. Last summer, when the heat and humidity in Manhattan is unbearable, he spent six weeks at a cottage in Haliburton. And he’s going to Paris for the month of May where, with a laptop, he can still handle urgent issues for clients if necessary. When asked how long he thinks he’ll be staying in New York City, he says, “Definitely indefinitely.” True, if he sold his house in Toronto he could manage a down payment in NYC, but he’s not interested.
“The trouble is the equity I have in that house represents a lot of my wealth and the New York real estate market is volatile. I could lose my shirt, and it’s the only shirt I have.”
Besides, he points out, within the circles he travels, it’s perfectly acceptable to rent. “I know a lot of lifelong renters. They’re smart, educated and successful. They rent because they want to or because they’re in a rent-controlled apartment that they’d be nuts to leave or because they’ve done well but never made quite enough to crack into the Manhattan market and don’t want to relocate outside the city.
“I think the obsession with owning is too bad. To me, the idea that anyone would judge people as unsuccessful because they don’t own property is gross.”
Looking out his window at the east side of Manhattan, Oxford tells me that in 1649, his paternal grandmother’s ancestors, named van Valkanberg, were untitled nobility granted land in what was then New Amsterdam. They owned much of what he can see, including the property on which his apartment building sits.
“Then they sold it to the Roosevelts,” he says, laughing. “What were they thinking?” David Hayes is an author and award-winning feature writer who has been a renter most of his life. If you have stories or information to share about renting, reach David at lifelong_renter@sympatico.ca.