cityscape
Renting Isn’t a Dirty Word
It's just pretty normal.
Photo by thebuildup from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
Housing is really expensive. For a lot of Torontonians, that means they rent for longer periods of time before pursuing home ownership or forego that goal altogether.
It’s a pretty common conversation where someone will ask another person what their rent is like, and they’ll compare notes on what makes a good deal and how long they had to look to find it. You know, real world stuff.
And then you see this comment from Paul Smetanin, the CEO of the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis, which makes us scratch our heads because it’s totally not where we’re at.
“In Canada, unlike other countries, (renting) is typically associated with the affordable housing end of the spectrum. In Vienna, 60 per cent of that city is rental — beautifully constructed buildings and it’s market rental, so people aren’t house-poor,” reports the Star.
Smetanin’s argument is that renting will become more normalized as the city’s housing market evolves. That sounds pretty fair, as the high prices may very well crush the home ownership dreams of many Torontonians (invest in index funds, maybe!). But the way it’s characterized in the article—“rental stigma,” and a “‘tainted’ housing choice”—seems really out of line with our experiences.
It’s true that renters haven’t always had respect in this city and elsewhere. For a long time, renters in Toronto didn’t have local voting rights (that finally changed in the 1960s), and politicians love to spend way too much time on the mythical middle class homeowner with kids. But renting is a pretty normal and reasonable thing to do.
But maybe we just go to different house parties.