We have a crisis of housing affordability in this city. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know: we’re obsessed with it, items at city council this month are trying to tackle parts of it, multiple mayoral candidates either released housing plans this week or are planning to do so next, and others already have at least parts of theirs out.Some of us are forced to move out of longtime rental homes and enter a rental market where even an average one-bedroom apartment goes for $2,500 per month .
A friend of mine recently put a name on this in a Facebook post that got me thinking about it again: she said she’d spent so long suffering from housing-cost inspired “Toronto tunnel vision” that it was all consuming. She gave me permission to write about her and her online post, but asked not to be named directly because her employer would frown on it. I knew her, when she was here, as one of those people I associate with— like a Toronto booster, active in the arts community and in political causes. The kind of person who contributes to the city’s culture, and who you don’t expect to go somewhere else.