School’s out, and kids across Canada and the United States are in party mode this long weekend as our countries celebrate our respective national holidays. But what’s in store for them throughout the summer?

The New York Times recently published an excellent piece about working parents who can’t afford summer learning programs for their children. While the article rightfully pours light on the challenges of families with low net incomes, it occurred to me that families with relatively high incomes can get themselves into summer trouble, too. It’s called being house poor, and it’s a massive issue here in Toronto.

One of my biggest aspirations as a parent is to enable my child to have an amazing summer. “Amazing” doesn’t need to be synonymous with exclusive or expensive. But when I see young Toronto couples paying $700,000 for a semi-detached house with street parking just to get in to the city’s overheated real estate market, I have to wonder: what’s left to spend (and save!) each month after the mortgage and bills are paid?

Jey and I rent. Our small house with its leafy back yard is “ours” for way below its current market value. This is partly because we’ve lived here for several years (thereby escaping the insane leap in rental costs over the same period), and because our landlords never wished to extort us.

For now, the basics of family life are comfortably affordable. We don’t panic about how to pay for Baby Ell’s play group, or our car (which we must own for Jey’s work, unfortunately). Our manageable carrying costs have allowed us to clear our student loans (we each paid our own way through university), plus sock away a respectable deposit for “our real home”. Retirement savings and Baby Ell’s education fund are in progress.

But our neighbourhood is changing. Around us, other small houses are being demolished and rebuilt into bland monstrosities that are slapped with price tags so high, they make our heads spin. Banks are telling people—including us, when we first inquired—to borrow up to 8 times(!) their salary. Every “Open House” results in a flood of illegally parked cars carrying young couples who are hoping to fall in love, and then cast the winning bid with help from a personal letter of plea to the seller. (In Toronto, a winning bid typically amounts to tens of thousands over asking.)

Jey and I wonder almost daily if our landlords will sell out. You might think we’re worried. We used to be.

There are many reasons we want to live in Toronto, and we (well, I) lost a serious amount of sleep over the twilight zone that is our city’s housing market…until I had an epiphany: a house in Toronto—or in its suburbs—is just not worth it, in my opinion. I don’t want to be eaten by a gigantic mortgage and the pricey, time-consuming responsibilities that come with owning a house – all while hoping that its eventual sale will allow me and Jey to retire comfortably.

Hitching our lives to a house in Toronto in our mid-30s would be akin to building a castle in the sand.

So, with the birth of Baby Ell and after a lot of soul searching, we’ve instead decided to own less and live more. It’s a theme I’ll be exploring often on this blog.

I don’t mean living in the spirit of “Tony”, whose recent account of self-indulgent-globetrotting-while-his-mom-still-does-his-laundry, published in Toronto Life, provided me with the most entertaining non-fiction read I’ve had in ages. Unlike Tony, we’re not planning to let family members do the owning for us while we chase dopamine highs.

We’re going minimalist.

Our take on minimalism will be owning a 2-bedroom + den condo powered by solar panels. It’s in our current neighbourhood, and it’s costing half the amount of a semi-detached house – condo fees included. Our 20% deposit gives us favour with the bank and the mortgage insurer. We (well, I) get a dopamine high just thinking about purging all the stuff we felt we needed to own because we live in a house.

Truthfully, the condo was not an easy decision. Having grown up in houses ourselves (Jey in the countryside, no less), we never pictured our home as a box in the air. We wanted Baby Ell to taste dirt for the first time in his own back yard. We wanted to hang Canada’s flag from a sunny front porch. But as we wait for move-in day, and as we watch the quest for house ownership plunge families into years of (covertly) living paycheck to paycheck with the blind faith that it’s a solid investment…we feel relief.

After an elevator ride and a short walk or transit trip, Baby Ell will have a plenitude of parks to play in, and local beaches to build sand castles on. We’ll be able to save for his summer learning experiences at day camp and sleep-away camp – and perhaps take an (affordable) annual family vacation.

We won’t put our child’s future on a credit card. We won’t let him be summer poor.

 

*Photo taken at Halfway Lake Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada