THE END OF HOMEOWNERSHIP

For generations, middle-class Canadians have been sold on the promise of homeownership. The promise was always flawed. Today it’s simply broken.

- MICHELLE CYCA

I WAS BORN IN Vancouver in 1987, and I’ve lived here nearly all my life. Anyone of my generation who grew up in this city spent their youth hearing constantly about the twin dangers that imperilled our future: a city-annihilating earthquake, and the always-rising cost of housing. Either might one day make living here impossible. Both felt vast and inevitable, forces beyond our control. So we carried on in the face of disaster, doing our best to ignore it.

In 1992, the year I did my first earth-quake drill in kindergarten, Vancouver overtook Toronto as the most expensive housing market in the country. After finishing an undergraduate degree in Victoria, I returned in 2009 and spent my 20s moving from one rental to another— seven apartments, six neighbourhoods and five roommates in all. Fourteen years ago, it was still possible to find an apartment for $650 or $700 a month, especially if you were willing, as I was, to tolerate a gas leak, a creepy landlord or a solarium repurposed as a bedroom in exchange for below-market rent.

A few of my friends even made the leap into ownership in their 20s, almost always with the help of family. In the early 2010s, you could get a small one-bedroom or a studio apartment for $300,000 or so. That was a significant downgrade from my parents’ generation, for whom an equivalent inflation-adjusted sum would have bought a single-family home nearly anywhere in the city. But it was a foothold on the property ladder, and I believed then that it would be possible for all of us to do the same, to make our homes in this city we loved. We would, somehow, follow the upward trajectory of previous generations, whose rising incomes allowed them to graduate to homeownership in due course.