My housing story
When families like mine need to claim a piece of the affordable housing pie, those who need it most get even less.
I started writing this post on May 3rd, before the Planning and Housing Committee started hearing delegations on scaling up non-profit housing in Ottawa.
I wasn’t able to watch the entire meeting but in a nutshell, elected officials agreed that something had to be done. Tomorrow they will vote against affordable housing in their wards, demand lower density in their neighbourhoods, and refuse to consider tax increases to fund housing and transit in their city. But on May 3rd, they all agreed that someone should do something about housing affordability in Ottawa.
I hope that you will pardon my cynicism when I hear Councillors Dudas, Kitts, and Curry make mouth noises about the importance of housing affordability barely 3 months after they rejected an affordable housing application in Orleans on account that it did not provide enough parking. It’s easy to support affordable housing in the abstract during a committee meeting dedicated to it. It’s not so easy when you have to consider it against angry homeowners, parking, road congestion, property taxes, higher density, or “neighbourhood character.” In the words of Taylor Swift (ft. Bon Iver): “I think I've seen this film before. And I didn't like the ending.”
The housing crisis is often described in statistics. What do you see when you read that one in eight households in Ottawa are in core housing need? I used to be a pretty average privileged white woman before my divorce and the definition of “core housing need” would have conveyed an image of squalor, of large immigrant families, of a single mom at the food bank. I would have seen lineups, precarious employment, language barriers, addiction and mental illness. I would have thought of “the most vulnerable”. I would never have thought of someone like me today: white, highly educated, bilingual in the two right languages, qualified, employed.
My husband and I separated in early 2020. We had been homeowners for most of our adult life, buying our first home in 1999 and boot-strapping ourselves to bigger and better homes as home prices increased steadily. When we moved to Stittsville in 2017, we decided to rent. When we separated in 2020 we had been lapped by the market: not only did we have to split our equity in two, but it was no longer enough to put a downpayment on a home in Ottawa.
In the summer of 2020, I started looking for a house to rent in Stittsville where I could live with my children. At that time, I had no separation agreement and no child support. I was a councillor’s assistant making $72,000/year, which cleared about $3200 per month with 6 children to support part time. A quick back-of-the-napkin calculation of what is considered “affordable” on a gross salary of $72,000 is $1800/month. It does not account for how many mouths I have to feed after I paid $1800 but it will do.
I drew a “walkable” circle on a map around the kids’ school and started looking for a house to rent in that area. I say “a house to rent” because the number of rental apartments in Stittsville is not statistically significant. Of those barely-there apartments, zero have 3+ bedrooms. At the time, the lowest rent for the handful of 2-bedroom units in Stittsville was $1900/month.
I found a 3-bedroom townhouse in my location of choice for $2300/month plus utilities. Someone who was helping me with budgeting said: “Imagine that at the beginning of the month, someone hands you 32 $100 bills. That’s your salary for the month. Then you turn around and give 23 of those to your landlord. Your rent is not sustainable.” He suggested that I find a one-bedroom apartment or a room I could afford and let my children live with their dad. That was well-meant but not going to fly in any configuration.
Letting the children live with their dad seemed inevitable at many points in the journey. One aspect of the housing crisis that is rarely discussed is the blatant sexism and discrimination that women-led households encounter in the search for a rental, especially in communities where purpose-built rentals are absent. In Stittsville, rentals are in the hands of hobby investors, the mom-and-pop shops of the rental market. I once had a candid conversation with someone who owned a handful of rental townhouses in the east-end of Ottawa. He told me that he would sooner rent to someone with 4 dogs than 4 children.
At first, I naively put my four children on the rental applications. I didn’t even get call backs. I started putting only two children on the rental applications. It barely felt dishonest: the standard rental application form only has two lines for children. It’s not like people are allowed to turn you down because you have kids anyways. I still could not find a home to rent. Eventually, I stopped putting children on my rental applications altogether.
At last, one landlord had the honesty to tell me that he had found an Ottawa Citizen article about my large family, published in 2014, when I was participating in the Human Library Project. He asked me point blank if I was planning to move into the house with 9 children. I explained that the oldest four kids were now adults and that the youngest 5 lived with their dad. That was technically correct in November 2020. I got the rent but my ex-husband had to guarantee the lease. My ex-husband was starting to date again and looking forward to having his ex-wife out of the house. He reluctantly agreed to co-sign my lease and I moved out.
I often joke to friends and family: “It’s hard to be trailblazers, as the first family to ever divorce…” In a recent post about caregiver accommodations, I wrote that traditional beliefs about gender roles and family responsibilities were alive and well in the workplace. It’s even more egregious in the housing market. One of my friends and her three children were turned down for a rental because “ a real family had just applied”. I was told that a townhouse was not appropriate lodging for a family of 6: “I believe – the landlord’s reply said – that there is a minimum amount of space that each person needs in a house and a townhouse does not offer that minimum space for your family.”
Beliefs like these might sound marginal but if you pay attention, you can hear them out loud during public meetings on development applications. In March 2022, when the redevelopment plan for Manor Park Estates came up at the Planning Committee, a real estate agent said: “No one wants to raise children in a tower” as if it was a reason not to build affordable housing. The idea that we shouldn’t build denser housing because “no one will want to live there” is routinely heard at committee. “People want a backyard and a white picket fence” (I think this is pretty close to a direct quote from Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford). A picket fence? A backyard? When it comes to housing, the one-in-eight Ottawa resident in core housing need doesn’t give a single sh*t about a backyard or a white picket fence. We’re just hoping for 4 walls, a roof, and enough money leftover to feed our kids after we pay the rent.
Today, I still consider myself (and my children) precariously housed. We live in a cozy 3-bedroom townhouse with my partner, close to my favorite park, walking distance from school and transit, and biking distance from everything else. The house does not exactly meet our needs. Our family expands and shrinks every 3 days from 4 to 7 people. My 21 year-old daughter lives with us while she attends college. My four younger children go back and forth between their dad’s house and mine. My middle child does the opposite swing from his siblings. I often feel like I’m running an AirBNB, changing sheets and cleaning up rooms for different guests two or three times a week. My youngest child sleeps on a mattress in my bedroom that we pull out of the closet every evening. It works. For now.
I hope to stay here for 10 more years or until my youngest child is done with high school. Since my home is owned by a couple of hobby investors it’s impossible to know when they will decide to cash-in on their investment.
Housing for me is like a three-legged stool: I need my employment income, my partner’s half of the rent and my child support to pay the rent. If I lose any one of the legs – none of which are entirely in my control – I lose my roof. I recently lost my job, which means that the two remaining legs have to pick up the slack until I find a new one, assuming they are willing and/or able to do so. Once a month, I do a “cooperative check” to see if we can get on the waiting list for one of the coops in Ottawa but even the waitlists are closed. People tend to move out of coops in pine boxes, as I would if I was lucky enough to score some non-market housing.
The image of the family in core housing need is not the one that most people have. The problem is not that “people like me” (white, educated, privileged in every way) shouldn’t be in this situation. The problem is that people like me are now competing with the poor, the marginalized, the sick, and the old for limited resources like food banks, subsidized daycare, social housing, housing subsidies, and non-market housing.
The social services pie is not getting bigger. When educated, employed, healthy, stable households need to claim a piece of that pie, those who really need it most get even less.