Living on cruise control
Well, I’m not exactly homeless but there are some question marks around my housing. Please read on.
I moved into my Port Moody, British Columbia, condo when my kids were still tiny. I still recall walking through the door and my youngest was a bit wobbly on his little legs. That was over ten years ago and it took a while to find the place. We had two cats, two little kids, my wife insisted on having her own washing machine and I had to pray for some luck. That’s because people treated us like lepers. Either we had too many pets or too many kids. It was a nightmare until we got lucky.
Then I spent years working on my landscape career and the kids slowly grew up. My wobbly son became a soccer player and his older sister became artsy. Then COVID hit and things became goofy. I had some idea that rents in my building were creeping up when the people moving in diagonally across from me paid several hundred dollars more per month.
Post-COVID
I’m not sure when the wheels fell off but, post-COVID, housing in the Lower Mainland got much worse. Then I received the dreaded e-mail from my landlord, informing me that they intended to sell the place. I was their first target. I could buy their tired two-bedroom condo for $560,000.
Now, since that e-mail, interest rates have sky-rocketed and rents shot up as well. Normally, I would pack up and move somewhere close so my kids could stay in their high school and close to their friends. But, as of late 2022, it’s cheaper to buy than rent in the Lower Mainland. That’s insane.
Now what? Whatever happens, my housing costs will go up by 30-40% percent. This being British Columbia, my six-figure income isn’t really sufficient for a great life with adequate housing. So, I’m doing what I can. Step one is scaling my landscaping side-hustle operation. As my day-job employer moves to a four-day week, I will work for myself more.
Installing a shop with merchandise on this blog is also part of my strategy to avoid homelessness.
The real cause of homelessness
You might say, Vas, relax, you’re not addicted to illegal drugs and you don’t suffer from mental illness. You’re not likely to end up homeless. And you’d be wrong, as Jerusalem Demsas nicely points out in “The looming revolt over homelessness” (Jan/Feb 2023, The Atlantic Monthly, pp.15-18).
Booming, well-to-do cities suffer from homelessness because there is a shortage of affordable housing. That nicely describes the current situation in British Columbia. I’ve seen rents rise to C$2,700 in Port Moody this year, which makes my C$1, 325 current rent from ten plus years ago look like a mistake.
My landlord definitely noticed and when I was slow to move out she proposed this solution to me. Sign a new lease, pretending to be a new renter, for six months at C$2,000 per month. If I don’t buy the apartment, we’ll renegotiate. Presumably, I would get another increase to get us to the current C$2,700 levels.
I declined because pretending to be a new renter after ten plus years is comical; as is accepting a 30% increase without notice. This is every landlord’s dream, and it wouldn’t hold up after my complaint.
2023
I have zero control over landlords, inflation, interest rates and rising rents. All I can do is increase my income and ride it out. I may just buy the old apartment with down payment help from my rich father-in-law; or I will accept higher rent because my side-hustle income will nicely cover what I project to be a 40% increase in my housing costs.
Housing in British Columbia is broken because people are allowed to treat condos as investments, not principal residences. We need a fix, quickly, before I blow up from working seven days a week.
