Day Nine: All We Do is Complain
Brockton Avenue, Indian Road Crescent, Brunswick Avenue, Palmerston Avenue
Baņuta: We saw four apartments on the week-end.
That was depressing. Exploitation is depressing. I’m looking for the funny but it's elusive.
The fanciest place housed a couple of Ukrainian refugees, two young women. One of them had just arrived. I asked her where she came from and didn’t hear the answer properly. So I told her I had no idea where her hometown was and they both looked crushed. Later I realized she’d said ‘Odesa.’
She was a smallish blonde woman and her friend was very tall and strong. They both dressed up in spotless summer frocks. “To go apartment-hunting,” their host — our prospective landlord — told us. Welcome to a fresh hell, I thought.
The landlord had a giant OM painted on a wall and dreamed of a communal house where everyone shared the food bill but not everyone shared his parking spot. It was near Brock and Dundas in an alley not an avenue. The building was one of the boldest designs I’ve seen in this city, a reconstructed warehouse, with some truly high ceilings and a reasonable deck, yet heated by electric base heaters (why?) and with only one, very small, bathroom. The layout felt like it was trying too hard; pretending to be cutting edge, but actually uncomfortable, like wearing vinyl hot pants.
At least the last place we looked at on Palmerston was an entire house. (This was where we met the bereaved landlord, who was truly bereaved, and heartbreakingly young.) The house was too small for us but also strangely shambolic. The garden was overgrown, and the garage in the back had completely collapsed; you couldn’t park a car in it and you might step on something sharp and wonder when you last had a tetanus shot. I crept down to the basement with Keely and fully expected a lumpy shape in a garbage bag to start kicking and moaning like in a Japanese horror film I had the misfortune to watch past midnight at the Bloor once.
The price was high, too.
In the third apartment the real estate agent kept rolling her eyes as she told us that the market was crazy and getting crazier. Otherwise I have only one comment left in me and that’s for the apartment on Brunswick. This was a dump run by a slum landlord and it was definitely meant for that mythical creature ‘students.’ There was a lot to be depressed about here but the price bothered me the most: $2900 for 3 bedrooms, no living room and no dining room. My daughter shares a three bedroom nearby with a big living room and dining space. It costs $2700. She got it two years ago. This price increase is like the price of bread doubling by next year. Which, given the war in Ukraine, it might.
Alan:
So yeah, we saw four places. The first one was a nice place for someone to live but not us and not at that price, which was not the $3 500 we thought because the landlord also said something about five hundred dollar a month in utilities which came to a total of 4K. When we balked at the price he told us that he has seen places going for seven thousand dollars, which I told him I haven’t seen but obviously it made him feel better to believe it. I liked him. He was a good guy. But he wasn’t even sure he wanted to rent the place as an apartment rather than a bunch of rented rooms.
I say it was 4000 but I’m not sure, had we taken it that there wouldn’t have been additional charges, like a bidet tax or an extra charge for the cat. Or a design tax. The design did have its eccentricities. The third bedroom had two levels, and the second one led to a nice deck. Though it was really more a platform than a room, the landlord transformed it by having a bed specially made to fit the narrow space. Presto, another space to rent He seemed very proud of that little bed, adding something about how the mattress was scientifically made to be extra firm.Or maybe he said the mattress was made out of dinosaur tears.
As strange and expensive as that place was, as Baņuta and I often say, “If it were next year and we were desperate, we would take it happily.”
At the second place on one of those streets that contains the word Indian, there was a nice agent showing it to us and at some point a man’s voice emerged from the front and yelled to us that he was the owner and did we have any questions, and I deeply regret not yelling back, “Yes I have a question. Have you no shame?”
If we have learned one thing in our search it’s that a lot of landlords want to turn a single floor of their house into a three bedroom apartment to get more money. And it’s not possible to have three bedrooms on the main floor in your average Toronto house. Or on the second floor. So sacrifices have to be made. By the tenant, of course.
The place was beautifully renovated. But it didn’t have a living room. Or it had a living room but nowhere to eat. We thought the room adjacent to the kitchen was a dining room but the agent must have thought it was a living room because she suggested we put in one of those tables that folds down from the wall when you want to eat, which you wouldn’t do if it was actually intended to be a dining room. So you could have a living room with a pull down table or a dining room with a pull down couch.
It would have been a very nice two-bedroom apartment, but the man behind the offscreen voice might have felt some shame asking 3800 dollars for a two bedroom so he went with the magical solution which was to call your two bedroom a three bedroom. Do the same thing on the second floor and make some kind of basement apartment and now the house you bought as an income property makes you almost ten thousand dollars a month in rent.
Asshole. This is why we hate rich people. I could have been one of them and if I had been and I owned my own home and also your home, I hope I would have had more empathy than the smug smiley men we’ve been meeting who want to be your friends, want you to confirm for them what nice guys they are, while they hold you upside down and shake you to see if they can shake out a few more coins.
I feel like we’re going to see this apartment again and again and again.
The third place on Brunswick Avenue made me hate my life and by extension hate the world. And it wasn’t just the lineup of young people and students and young people with their parents that depressed me so deeply. But that was a big part of my immediate sadness and anger, that I’m in that position, again. I don’t want to try and make anyone feel sorry for me, I’ve been blessed in many ways, but I felt disrespected by life itself that things have fallen apart to this extent that we’re in this lineup with all these kids to get this apartment, in this poor excuse for a backyard, sitting on white plastic chairs that are only there so that people can come outside and have a smoke.
I wanted to leave. I didn’t want to go up and see it. I knew it would be bad.
It was worse. Much worse. The owner was there at the entrance, and though he was wearing a mask, I know his expression under that mask was “Yeah it’s a piece of shit and I really don’t give a fuck”. This guy took the turn-one-floor-into-a-three-bedroom-apartment thing to a whole other level. Four small rooms. A small kitchen you couldn’t eat in and three small rooms for bedrooms. It was a fucking slum apartment on one of the nicest streets in the city. And if I was 19 living with two other friends, and my parents were paying, I guess I’d be happy to eat in my room and then go up the street and drink a lot of beers and come back to the yard and smoke on the white plastic chairs.
And if he’s lucky, that 19 year old grows up to buy an income property with his old roommates and they treat their tenants like shit and tell themselves “We lived like that and look how we turned out”.
This has been too long so I won’t say anything about the fourth place, which at least was a whole house, but the rooms were really small and it was expensive and we’re just not that desperate. Yet.
P.S. We thank the friends who made the connections for two of those apartments. Keep those tips coming, please, even if all do we afterwards is complain.
as a landlady myself, I feel grubby and embarrassed by association, after reading some of these accounts. (Though, my tenants have SAID they were very happy.)
And still, I am about to rent (I hope) a tiny (approx. 300-400 sq ft) bachelor apartment that I have used as an office and guest room during the pandemic. I hope it will bring in at least $1500 month. Given my personal history of rent costs, the amount relative to sq footage seems crazy. But, I'm disappointed to report that I ain't getting rich. After contributing its share of property tax, heat, utilities, maintenance, etc. costs (per its share of building's sq footage), you may be shocked to hear - I know that I was shocked to realize - that my presumed "profit" will (in 10 years) merely pay off the $s that I spent renovating the apartment. (It had deteriorated into the hellhole category by the time a previous tenant had moved out.)
I'm not complaining: it will be nice to have that expense paid for and I will still own it. I only hope that it appreciates in value enough to justify that my heirs and successors will need to take out to cover the capital gains tax due upon my demise.
I'm reminded of an aunt of mine, who sold real estate in California back in the 80s, who told me she'd finally figured out the whole inflation thing. "You look at something - whether a house, or a dress, or the meat in the butcher shop - and whatever you expect it would cost, add two zeros! Easy!"
No doubt a bit of exaggeration for comic effect; but perhaps I figured, since she entered adulthood and began to deal with what things cost in the late 30s, early 40s, that set her cognitive framework for all that followed?
And here WE are 50 years after the 70s ...