Worried about how to afford a home in Toronto? Try these ‘foolproof’ life hacks

Affordability is an overwhelming concern in Toronto. You can tell because politicians are always vaguely gesturing at it, and polls for years have shown it’s people’s top concern, and because you find you can no longer justify luxuries such as “food” and “shelter” like you once could.

Worrying about how to afford to live has become virtually a full-on side hustle for many of us: a Scotiabank poll released this month revealed that the average time Canadians spend worrying about their finances is now 15 hours per week, “equivalent to a part-time job.”

If you’re one of those staying up at nights agonizing about this, you’ve come to the right place. Through diligent research I have uncovered the foolproof life hack that makes affording a home — and therefore affording life — in Toronto a breeze. You can tell it’s foolproof because hundreds of thousands of people, likely including fools you know personally, have already benefitted from using it. Rather than set up a lucrative seminar to make you pay to learn this dead-simple system (who can afford that?), I’m going to reveal it here as a benefit to Star readers.

Ready? Here it is, in three simple steps: 1) save up an amount between $10,000 and $50,000, 2) buy a house, and 3) I cannot stress this part enough, it’s very important: do this during the 1990s.

If you employ this system, you wind up not just with a place to live, but also hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions!) of dollars in equity from housing appreciation — and you still have extremely manageable mortgage payments or quite possibly no mortgage payments by now.

The added benefit of this system, enjoyed by thousands of homeowners in Toronto already, is that politicians make it their mission to ensure life remains affordable and comfortable for you: property taxes are kept low in the name of protecting your finances, interest rates and mortgage policies are carefully managed over decades to ensure that your home value keeps going up and your equity keeps growing. With this system, you attain a status of respect in society where your fears about the “single-family character” of your neighbourhood are treated as a more pressing issue than building dozens of other people a place to live nearby. All those articles portraying climbing housing prices as good news suddenly start to make sense!

I admit, the system is not 100 per cent perfect for everyone. When people trip up and fail with this system, it’s usually on step three. Perhaps you didn’t have the foresight to be gainfully employed during the massive recession of the 1990s; perhaps you weren’t even born yet during that time period. That makes things trickier.

Luckily, there is a viable Plan B for those who find the 1990s an inconvenient time to buy a house. Just have your wealthy parents give you several hundred thousand dollars for a down payment.

In many instances, this route still leaves you with staggeringly high mortgage payments, and in recent months it comes with the possibility that the interest rate climate will mean your house will very soon not be worth as much as you paid for it. But these downsides must be balanced against the alternative scenario of being a tenant in the scorching fires of the Toronto rental market, where the often possible higher monthly costs come with the perpetual threat of “renoviction” and “own use” eviction, which can leave you scrambling for a place to live again within months or years.

Sadly, Plan B is also not for everyone. Some of us were not resourceful enough to wind up with parents possessing the right combination of generosity and deep pockets.

If you’re in this third category of people for whom neither the Plan A foolproof three-step system nor the fallback parental Plan B will work, then God help us all, you’re kind of stuck waiting for systemic change. This is a bit of a tougher road.

I mean, governments could build affordable housing on their own, and make it widely available, but they have not been doing that for some time and instead regularly let the subsidized housing they do own fall into such disrepair that it winds up condemned (see the current case of the Swansea Mews townhomes, for example). Governments could allow lots more homes to be built in forms like highrises, mid-rises, duplexes, garden suites and all that — and in fact governments have been making a lot of noise about doing that, but even as the prospect of new suburban sprawl in the Greenbelt is opened up, the idea of simply allowing rooming houses to exist in Toronto remains so controversial that recently a then-overwhelmingly popular mayor thought he needed to secure minority-rule powers to enact it. The former mayor’s four-year-old, allegedly legacy-defining “Housing Now” plan has produced zero units of housing, as of now.

Even if governments do all the things they could, it’s going to be a long, expensive wait. Meanwhile, the governor of the Bank of Canada has made it clear he sees things we might think improve affordability for us — things like getting a raise or widespread employment — as signals he needs to strangle the economy. And as long as he’s doing that, there’s a strange paradox for prospective homebuyers in which even lower housing prices somehow lead to housing that is less affordable.

I suppose that during those marathon worry sessions the bank’s poll tells us we’re engaged in, some of us could worry about voting in the upcoming mayoral election (and any other election that comes along) for candidates with a plan to do whatever they can to provide and allow a lot more housing as soon as possible.

That is not as simple or reliable as the three-step system, nor as straightforward as the parental Plan B. But for many hoping for an affordable life in Toronto, it may be the last, best alternative to the increasingly popular Plan X-it, which involves deciding not to worry about the affordability of life in Toronto anymore and instead moving somewhere else.

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