It's Brutal: Apartment-hunting in 2022
Baņuta: As if the world falling apart isn't enough, as if there aren't enough disasters looming, the day came when our landlady announced that she was evicting us from the house I've lived in for ten years now. There's a lot of things I'd like to say about this house, but for a while the blog is going to focus on looking for an apartment. So we will just stay in that zone. To set the stage, I am looking for a three bedroom apartment in Toronto, with my partner, Alan Zweig and his charming daughter, 11-year-old Keely, who moves back and forth between her mother's house and ours. We are skipping descriptions of the first two places we looked at because they were the reason we decided to write this blog. Both of us are going to write our impressions of the places and you, dear readers, are welcome to share your horror stories and cheer us on.
The one thing that united those first two places was that they were major sources of income for men who already had major sources of income who were buying up houses and fixing them up slightly to a just bearable level and asking for sky-high rents for conditions in which neither they, nor their children, nor their children’s children, would ever deign to live, and these same men thought of themselves as good and reasonable people. Though I would like to call them Brutal. The Brutalists.
DAY ONE
Vanauley
Alan: more than just looking at the rooms and the space and the location, I can’t help thinking about who we would be if we lived there or what our lives would be like or mostly how we would have to change, and none of that quite says it
Modern condo living. I imagine being friends with the doormen. I imagine being called “the old couple” by the kids that live there. The rooms were so small and on top of each other and there would be no privacy. And no dining room. Nowhere to put our table. No yard. I think of condos and I think of my parents’ condo but I don’t think we’re going to see that kind of condo
Baņuta: That place was sandwiched between a government housing complex with a bad reputation and one of the most legendary bars and birthplaces of theatre in Toronto. The lobby was like a Piet Mondrian painting if you drained all the colour out of it. One of the denizens walked by with a dog on a leash. It was the oldest corgi in the world, as old as the Queen, literally shuffling. The apartment was called 3 bedroom but one of the rooms had no windows. Good for sleeping in! We came upon one of the tenants hod just woken up and was slurring his words. He did have his own bathroom and a walk-in closet. That closet softened the brutality of the fact that there was no place to eat, unless sitting on the couch. This is how people used to live in the Soviet Union, only prettier. Alan said: like New York. But New York is more fun.