I’m standing in the basement of yet another semi-renovated, semi-detached house in the east end of Toronto, peering between the floor supports at what my Mike-Holmes-trained eye suspects is an illegal electrical junction box. My husband is not quite standing beside me – there’s under six feet of headway in the basement, and even less where he slouches under a bulkhead.
The home is priced at $25,000 more than a comparable house a block away because of its proximity to the subway. It’s so close to the subway, we’re sure we feel it rumble under our feet.
Slivers of paint from the poorly painted concrete floor lift as I walk to the stairs, and I duck, hoping not to brain myself on the low ceiling, as I have countless times in countless similar houses. I wonder if I’ve concussed myself recently, and that’s why all the houses we’ve seen in our search for our first home look exactly the same: 18-year-old roof, main-floor living room and dining room, brand-new kitchen with granite countertops and stainless-steel appliances leading out through new French doors to 20 feet of unmanicured backyard. Three bedrooms, the third always slightly smaller than you’d want. The same type of house that working-class families have lived in for decades in the city, now the exclusive domain of the double-income, Starbucks-drinking set.
We quickly do the same calculation we do every time we see a house: cost of repairs necessary in the next year (in this case a new roof, always some wiring) plus down payment and closing costs, plus required premium above the asking price required to secure a house, any house, in a real estate market where everyone’s terrified to sell, but hundreds of first-time buyers like ourselves are anxious to buy. The sum equals too much money for less than 1,500 square feet of home in a gentrifying neighbourhood. A neighbourhood we’d both give our eye teeth to live in, if we could just find the right place and be able to afford it.
My husband and I are in our late 30s, with two young boys who need space in which to run around, yet we’ve not yet taken the real estate plunge. We’ve lived in the same downtown co-op apartment since we married 10 years ago. We’ve put off home ownership in favour of other things: his PhD, having children, paying daycare costs each month, the odd bit of travel. Now, as we close in on 40, the itch to put down roots has become unbearable, and we regularly regret not buying earlier.
As we walk heel-toe to measure the dining area, wondering if it will fit both our dining room table and an upright piano, I remark that what we need is an affordable, big, four-bedroom suburban house – in the city. That way, we non-car owners could live in spacious comfort and still be within easy walking distance of a decent health-food store, playing fields, the library, the boys’ public school, restaurants, our families and work. Unfortunately for our children, who ask regularly for a backyard – with grass – we have urban tastes and a suburban budget, and we’re finding these competing concerns hard to reconcile.
So we bide our time, waiting for another drop in the market or for one of us to get a miraculous pay raise. Or a lottery win. As an alternative, I’ve made my husband promise that if I die before him, he is to bury me at a cemetery in a nice part of town, because it’s the only way I’ll guarantee that at some point I’ll live in a decent neighbourhood.
