Saskatchewan-based writer Patricia Dawn Robertson.
How much did your house make this year? That's the tired Christmas-party banter circulating in Saskatchewan.
Here in the country, we do our cost comparisons at The Dump. "How much did you say they paid for that new Snout House?" we gasp, while we watch another resourceful local climb Couch Mountain.
"I made five bucks!" one woman bragged to my partner Grant as she held out a handful of change. "How many couches did you have to rifle through to get that?" he asked, eyeing a ski hill of castoff sofas. "All of them!" she beamed as she climbed into her Escalade.
Prairie people are full of contradictions. Although sodbusters currently enjoy good times, we still scrounge for change like it's Next Year Country. I've been known to harvest the odd Pilsner bottle while I walk my border collie Laddie along Railway Avenue.
When we visited gritty downtown Regina this month, Grant had to restrain me from bending over to pick up a flattened Red Bull can on the way to see to see Bright Star at the Regina Public Library cinema.
It's late 2009 and the Regina boom is still in full bloom. In 2007, for seven long months, we naively rented a former drug house. Note to self: Don't use Google Earth to locate a rental property. You can't see the crack pipes from that vantage point.
The other lesson I learned from my Regina slumlord experience was: You don't want to be a renter in a boomtown. For most of 2009, a 1-per-cent vacancy rate on Regina apartments meant many long-time renters were squeezed out and left homeless.
As a smug homeowner, I can make light of my former housing situation. But many Saskatchewan low-income people who have been punted from the rental market are not laughing.
Forget about Saskatchewan home ownership. That dream died when housing prices soared in the past three years. Now a local renter's only solace may be a bus ticket to down-market Winnipeg.
But it's not just Regina on the uptick here in the Land of Bloated Real Estate. Prince Albert, Moose Jaw, Saskatoon, Yorkton and the Battlefords have all seen a remarkable rise in prices due to economic gains and speculation prompted by our previously undervalued real-estate market.
Even my humble little town of Wakaw is enjoying an unprecedented housing bubble. My elderly neighbours can now rent their basement suite for $500 a month. When we first rolled into town in 2004, a whole house rented for $200.
Ever since 1993, when the federal government offloaded the funding of social housing to the provinces, the free market has set the Dickensian agenda.
Affordable housing in Saskatchewan has now exceeded the reach of low-income renters. Condo conversions and exalted loft projects dominate the original three-storey, Boomtown-facade skyline. What remains for many Saskatchewan renters are overpriced ghettos. You want running water and heat? One Regina tenant recently forked over $1,000 for a substandard rental without proper amenities.
No one should have to choose between paying the slumlord and buying groceries, yet many do. Affordable housing, public health and food security are all interconnected.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty contemplates tinkering with the CMHC so the current housing bubble doesn't implode.
Yet I hear no similar excited talk about affordable housing, co-operatives or homelessness. Just more middle-class moaning about the "sustainability" of bloated mortgages and furrowed brows about whether Mr. Flaherty will excise the 5-per-cent-down program.
If Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants my support, he must expropriate the housing portfolio from his hapless provincial premiers. If he curtails his $19-billion annual defence budget - bloated by our Afghanistan folly - the feds can finally afford to address the messy business of social housing.
Let's start with North Regina.
Patricia Dawn Robertson is a Saskatchewan writer.