Full house with a modern twist
Parents sold their dream home to help their son and his wife buy a place in the city
Jean-Paul Bédard was at the table having dinner when he had a brainwave. Depending who you asked, his flash was one of two things: either a brilliant solution to the GTA’s prohibitive property market, or just totally bananas.
Bédard, 49, was at the table with his wife Mary-Anne, 48, and their son and daughter-in-law, Noah, 25, and Jackie, 26. The young couple had a plan: “House, baby, open a restaurant.”
But they were stalled at the start. Like many young adults in the city, their efforts to get into the real estate market had been, said Noah, “terrifying!”
The numbers were steep and the terrain littered with the obstacles for first-time homebuyers: the down payment; the reality of paying CMHC mortgage insurance; and the prospect of having tenants to subsidize their investment.
Jean-Paul, a teacher and writer, and Mary-Anne, a director in the City of Toronto’s housing department, had toyed with ways to help. But freeing up a cash loan would have required taking on more debt on their own house in the Upper Beach. It was a beloved empty nest — a lovely, low-maintenance little place with manageable finances. They felt house rich. It was a place to grow old in. But the best-laid plans . . . At dinner, Mary-Anne recalls, “Jean-Paul just piped up without consulting anyone and said: ‘We should buy a house together!’ ”
And not just any house, but a modern twist on the multi-generational home: One roof, two separate spaces, two separate mortgages.
“I was looking at him like: ‘What are you saying?’ ” laughs Mary-Anne. ‘We live in the perfect home!’ ”
“I thought Mary-Anne was going to throw her wine across the table,” Jean-Paul admits about his wife of 28 years.
The plan was this: Jean-Paul and Mary-Anne would sell their place and cover the down payment on a collectively owned home. Noah, a chef at Toronto’s Drake Hotel, and Jackie, a server at the Drake,
The young couple had a plan to buy a house. But they were stalled at the start
would start building equity by taking a mortgage on their stake in the building. And in seven to 10 years, they would sell the property and divide profits according to each couple’s ownership share — leaving Noah and Jackie with a down payment for a place of their own.
“The main idea was, one: to help them not waste their money in rent; and two: to get them on the property ladder,” says Jean-Paul.
“Every week it felt like it was getting further and further away from them.”
Swayed by the plan’s big-hearted logic and the prospect of family time, with an eye on future grandchildren, Jean-Paul and Mary-Anne came to a philosophical conclusion: If you can’t bet on your own kid, who can you bet on?
Real estate lawyers being another demographic to bet on, the foursome drafted a legal agreement, starting at “catastrophe and working backwards,” and then teamed with Lani Fumerton of Re/Max Hallmark Wright Group to find a property that could satisfy all four investors.
Now, six months after moving in together, they are hanging around Jean-Paul’s and Mary-Anne’s upstairs apartment in the red-brick Victorian row-home the two couples eventually bought together for $990,000 in Cabbagetown South.
It’s a sometimes-seedy neighbourhood that Fumerton jokes is like “Manhattan, but with an edge.”
They bake oatmeal chocolate chip cookies together, completely from memory and in under eight minutes. It’s obvious from their irreverent ease together that the bet was a good one.
(A few deep-seated differences do bubble up: Does the perfect cookie finish cooking, still molten, on the counter? Or is that technique itself a little half-baked?)
The building has everything they figured a happy coexistence required: nicely finished apartments; access to transit; the rare, well-finished basement; room for a new generation; and, of course, privacy.
The move has totally transformed their lives and relationships in ways both material and more subtly profound.
Downstairs, Noah and Jackie live in the main floor-plus-basement unit, settled in a space they are invested in for the first time in their lives, learning home ownership and with people to share the bills. Their plan is within reach.
“We have a house, the baby seems possible,” Jackie says. “We have a support system. Now, I can see a future.”
“And it will be easier for us to get a business loan now that we have something they can take away from us,” Noah quips.
Upstairs, their future babysitters have downsized to fit into their sec- ond- and third-floor suite, shedding furniture and thousands of books.
For all, the real sense of freedom seems to come from somewhere else. Their time together is more spontaneous, more authentic — no more capital-V visits. And in tying themselves to one another in such a substantial way, the ground has shifted.
They aren’t really parents and kids anymore, but partners.
“We had to go into this as equals,” says Jean-Paul. “It’s a neat feeling relating to your kid as an adult. And I think Noah is looking at us differently, too.
“It’s both self-confirming and liberating that we can bet on bringing out the best in each other.”