Owning an overpriced house is highly overrated
We’re a house-mad city in a house-mad culture. It never fails to amaze me that the once-modest downtown Toronto neighbourhood I live in today boasts homes worth, on average, well over $1 million, some cruising toward double that value.
A recent report from the Royal Bank of Canada says house prices, after a tiny drop (don’t ever use the word plummet) are going to hold or even increase, much to the dismay of many who believe their only hope is for Toronto housing to lose some of its value.
We’ve lived comfortably in our house for three decades, raised two kids who are grown and gone. They took for granted that this one house is where they got to grow up, and still come back to, with its central location and casual beauty. Something always quite desperately needed fixing or upgrading, but that was not their concern.
And to this day, while it’s been substantially renovated, there are no en- suite bathrooms or other features that seem mandatory to many prospective house buyers.
This house was where they learned to ride their bikes in the back alley, have friends over, celebrate family functions and see themselves as part of a diverse community.
Why wouldn’t they have taken it for granted? Their father, from Montreal, had grown up the same way, in a spacious semi-detached house in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG) to which their grandparents welcomed them until they were starting university.
Then, their own housing bubble burst. As millennials, they plunged into the adult world knowing almost certainly that despite great educations and good jobs, they would not be able to buy a similar house for themselves on their own.
This is not a tragedy, economic or otherwise. And I get tired of hearing that it is, especially when I am in a group of relatively affluent boomer parents lamenting that very fact — that our kids can’t afford what we could. Even when I am joining the lamenting. We need to get a grip. Recently, at a dinner among good friends, I discovered I was the only one who hadn’t grown up in a house that my family owned.
Instead, we lived in rentals in Toronto, two small successive houses in the east end that saw my brother and me through to adolescence. After that, we lived with my parents in a large suburban apartment that now looks as if it hasn’t aged very well.
I don’t think I spent a minute of my childhood feeling socially inferior because my parents didn’t own a house. My best friend lived across the street, in a house her parents owned, and I can’t recall that either of us knew the difference. Why would we? No one back then talked of houses as if they were the holy grail, something to be on a perennial, arduous financially harrowing search for until the right one came along. The one known as the “dream house.” Although a “starter” home, which now can absurdly cost, if you stay in the city, up to $750,000, could be hailed as a great achievement, too.
I am not denying there is a housing crisis in this city. There most certainly is, but much of it centres on the lack of affordable rental housing, with many people just a paycheque away from losing what is already a too costly place to live.
That’s called housing precarity, and that is the tragedy. In a city like Toronto, which stubbornly remains not quite world class for the millions striving to make a good life here, there is no excuse for not having more affordable rental housing.
There are many reasons why we’ve come to this point: high construction costs, overpriced condos, a lack of vision and will on the part of city leaders to insist on the right increase of mixed-density housing as more and more people pour into the city, wanting to live near where they work.
But we may also have to encourage a different mindset, helping younger generations and even ourselves to let go of not just that “dream house” fantasy, but also the dream of any house.
House ownership ought not to be a status symbol in our society or even seen as the only stepping stone to financial independence.
We have to make renting as accessible and socially acceptable as buying. How do we do that?
I don’t know. But I wish one of the two major mayoralty candidates in Toronto would knock my socks off explaining in a simple way how this could be achieved.
I realize that by even talking about the need for many people to accept they will not own a home, I will rightly be accused of being richly hypocritical. After all, we’re boomers who bought our houses when the going was good, and made our killing as the value of those houses soared astronomically.
But I, at least, come from a rental background, and would rent again if the circumstances were right. In fact, I smiled the other day when a semi-retired friend said she was selling her condo and moving into something really great — a rentalonly apartment building.
For the first half of my life, I thought that was all there was.