LEFT, AND LEAVING
FROM NOVEMBER 2019 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
They stayed as long as they could, but for these Torontonians, life in the city came at too great a price. We reached them in their new homes, in Moncton, Bowmanville, Beamsville and beyond, to hear their stories about leaving it all behind
This summer, a social phenomenon found Toronto: the Leaving Party. I was invited to a few; my friends were invited to others. They weren’t going-away parties, where you popped corks and made toasts to the future. They were funereal gatherings, where people crowded in around zippered suitcases and duffle bags in homes no longer affordable to them, the victims of jaw-dropping rent increases and astonishing housing prices. They were artists and tech workers, lawyers and carpenters. They were everyone.
The story is almost formulaic: families and couples and singles who hung in there because they loved the city and all that it offered until the cost proved too much. They loved their parks and schools and rinks and cafés but the city couldn’t find a way to love them back. As a result, Toronto, and Toronto’s West End, was drained of them, those who tried to outlast the shift toward wealth and exclusivity even when it was painful for them. They sacrificed and then they left, hoping they wouldn’t get priced out of the next place, too.
Louis Marc Vautour has a Bay Street lawyer friend whose wife is a tenured U of T professor. He told Vautour, “If we can’t afford to own a house in Toronto, I don’t know who can.” That’s when Vautour realized he could never buy here. He moved to Moncton. He likes it there.
Corina J. Katheryn ended up in Hamilton. “In Toronto, I kept thinking how lots of people raise families in small spaces, but it just got to be too much,” she says. “I’d spent a large part of my life lusting after Parkdale-style houses and in Hamilton, we were able to afford that. We can also afford to be a single-income family for awhile.” Katheryn was living in a Liberty Village condo where she barely knew her neighbours, but, despite this, she feared a move would make her feel like she was missing out. She misses “the ROM and Parkdale Pete’s diner and the Rhino patio. I miss Loga’s Corner. I miss knowing everything about my city and I miss wandering the city for hours and always knowing where I am. I miss not having to explain to people from the U.S. where I come from.” But in Hamilton, she says, “we spent practically the entire summer outside in our backyard, something I couldn’t do in our condo because of the constant construction dust and noise, and bans on barbecuing on balconies. Hamilton isn’t perfect. There are a lot of challenges here. But I can see the stars at night from my backyard.”
It was physical pain that took John Ewaschuk elsewhere. He suffered discomfort in his back, but the doctors could never figure out why. They spent years looking until, suddenly, they diagnosed a malformed vertebrae. The pain was so severe that he had to stop working as a chef, pausing his life for two major surgeries and support from ODSP and CPP, which were slow to come. “Because it wasn’t a worker’s compensation case, I didn’t have any coverage, and I hadn’t built up any savings,” he tells me. “I applied to Ontario Works for support and got it. I was fortunate to be paying only $700 a month to share a three-bedroom Ossington and Bloor apartment with an absentee roommate, but OW said that my place was too expensive. I’d have to move. At the time you would have been hard-pressed to find a rooming house that cost less than $600 a month. This was winter, January 2009, so I moved back to Hamilton to recover. Whenever I visited Toronto, I found it hard to get around with my disability. Some of the subway stations were inaccessible with a walker. If I wanted to take a streetcar, I had to lift my walker up the stairs myself, which was against doctor’s orders. I sure as hell couldn’t afford to take cabs everywhere. This turned me off wanting to return to the city and the rent made it impossible to even consider. I left the city I loved. I have no plans to move back.”
Musician Dottie Cormier was a West End fixture. I remember bluegrass couch-and-table concerts with her high lonesome coterie as the sweet crashing sounds of the Roncesvalles streetcar roared through the her walls and windows. “Mine isn’t a hard-luck story, not compared to others,” she says, sighing through the words. “Rather, my feeling [in Toronto] was one of weight, burden and stress, leaning hard into rent and car payments, insurance, parking, daycare and groceries, all the while raising my young son. I knew that staying in the city meant no room for saving or buying. The prices were too high.” When she turned 40, she asked her parents if she could live with them for two years, out of the city, in Beamsville. “They’d relocated from downtown in 2002 to buy their first home. They obliged and I worked hard to pay the debt down and to secure enough money to also buy an affordable house in the same town. I bought in the nick of time,” she says. “Today I wouldn’t be able to afford it. My expenses aren’t any less, but at least I have something I own and a bit of security for retirement. I still travel to Mississauga daily for work. I commute and my carbon footprint is larger than it ever was. I feel guilty about being a part of the rat race: the long lines of traffic rushing to and from the city. I spend 2.5 hours a day in my car. Is it worth it? I guess we’ll see.”
“Once a downtowner and now in Ottawa, Dash Read utters the words that are the bumper sticker of our times: “Toronto is just kind of a dream crusher””
Stan Flint was another who left. Flint is tall and vested, with pressed trousers and fine shoes. His former city routine was to carve out a few moments each week when he could head to the lake and stand in the water, sometimes for seconds, sometimes longer. It was both an act of self-care and a celebration of where he lived. But after spending his entire life here, “I had to make some hard choices,” he says, pointing to “the rent. The ever-increasing rent.” When Flint’s ex-wife and kids arrived from Newfoundland to live in the city, they couldn’t afford a house or apartment so they ended up finding a place in Aurora. “In the West End, I was renting a room in the top floor of a house at an amazing rate,” he says, “but it was no place for a family. People who are locked in might be able to survive, but not if you have to move. My kids were in Aurora, so I moved to Aurora. I found a two-bedroom home with a large back deck for less than a one-bedroom in Toronto. It’s a 15-minute walk to the GO Station and because I work downtown, this is important. It’s okay. My kids are the world to me, but we all would rather be in Toronto. I sometimes wonder what will be left of the city and its heart.”
Dash Read, a 41-year-old sales representative for Innovation Realty and a former journalist who moved from his downtown Toronto condo to Ottawa in 2008, utters the words that are the bumper sticker of our times: “Toronto [is]... just kind of a dream crusher.” He’s heard from many people in his former industry who are seeking housing outside of Toronto due to affordability. “Unless [the] market crashes, I don’t see people being able to afford living in the city. I think that says something for the future,” he says. “Toronto is a city where you’re all in, and you’re probably gonna give up on certain things. For some people that even means things like having a family.”
Jenny Rosser is 41. She is a poet, and more proof that the writers and sculptors and musicians are leaving. “The problem with being a creative person [is] you don’t have money. You end up moving into a place you can afford and you’re the first symptom of gentrification,” she says. During her time in Toronto, she also encountered a mean city: harassment and bullying from individuals in her community, all of which played a part in her decision to leave town. “I just wanted to be my weirdo self, and it ended up being impossible to do that in Parkdale,” she says. “I’m happier elsewhere because I can have a bit more space around me where I’m not being mobbed on all sides by the kind of people who would like to see me disappear.” Friends admire Jenny’s ability to pivot to an entirely new place. Still, she says, “I hear, ‘Wow, you’re ending your career and moving to another city and starting over, you’re so brave.’ And I’m like, ‘No, man, I’m doing this to survive.’ What else can I do?”
Paige McMaster was guided out along a similar path. “I am a full-time university student with various mental health struggles,” she writes, “and with these difficulties, I’m unable to work and go to school at the same time. My partner, Stan, works seven days a week in two jobs. Even with him working that much, we couldn’t afford the rising rents in Toronto, so we decided to move back in with my mom over a year ago. My mother is retiring this upcoming summer. She is a child and youth worker but her retirement finances aren’t enough to carry the mortgage. So she is selling and moving to Prince Edward Island. Since Stan and I can’t afford rent in Toronto or any of the surrounding areas, we have decided to go with her.”
Musician Ashton Price has a more direct reason for leaving for Hamilton: “We’re all going to be moving there at some point. I wanna jump in before it gets too expensive.”
Finally, there’s Eric Lahey. Lahey lived a block from me, and his light was almost always on, and when it was on, you knew someone in there was having a good time. People stopped in, hung out, listened to a side, drank a beer. It was a corner house that helped light the crosswalk. My kids took their piano lessons there with another Cape Bretoner, holding it down in Bloorcourt before anyone called it that. Lahey lived in the city for 20 years, but now he’s in Halifax. Before leaving, he found an expensive basement apartment but “a basement apartment plays on you mentally,” and it contributed to his struggles with depression. “The last five years in the city, I wasn’t even exploring,” he says. “I was just going from work to home. I always felt that Toronto was my home, the place where I was going to make my mark. I don’t see how I can ever afford to come back now that I’m gone.”
Lahey told everyone he’d had enough and was leaving.
Friends threw him a Leaving Party.
And then, like so many, he left.