1. 6 8 va n m a g . c o m N o v e m b e r 2 0 11 n o v e m b e r 2 0 11 va n m a g . c o m 6 9
ames and Tina live in Point Grey, in a two-bed-
room basement suite in a Vancouver Special. Tina,
34, a former music teacher, is now a stay-at-home
mom. James, 35, teaches music and directs the
260-student Dr. Annie B. Jamieson Elementary
School string orchestra. He also gives private cello
lessons to bring in extra cash. Their twin boys
were born last May, and their challenge as a new
family of five is how to afford not groceries but
space. The search for a larger home has not gone
well. Real estate, they say, has been “a continual source of de-
pression” for seven years. “We feel fortunate to be healthy, have
three wonderful children, and have jobs that are mostly satisfy-
ing and interesting,” James says. But they’re tired of living below
ground. “Our dehumidifier and industrial mould-spore-remov-
ing air filter are playing too large a role in our lives.”
On their combined income—at around $80,000, it’s well
J
— b y T y e e B r i d g e —...gone
The exorbitant cost of housing, lack of decent jobs, and changing nature of
the economy have squeezed the middle class out. That’s why a generation
of ambitious young people is
AmandaSkuse

2. 7 0 va n m a g . c o m N o v e m b e r 2 0 11 n o v e m b e r 2 0 11 va n m a g . c o m 7 1
above the regional family me-
dian of $68,000—they’re still
knocking their heads against
the subfloor of the real-estate
boom. While in their 20s, they
saved for a down payment and
made offers on six houses in
Vancouver and Burnaby. De-
spite bidding over the asking
price almost every time, says
James, they always lost out.
“Today, any starter home in the
Lower Mainland is far out of
our financial reach. We didn’t
ever think that we’d be 35 years
old having never lived above
ground level.” They love Van-
couver, and want to stay close
to their families and their roots.
But, like many middle-income
earners here—web designers
and police officers, young ar-
chitects and teachers—they
find themselves rehashing
halfhearted talks of packing
everything into a moving van.
“Maybe we’ll head to Victoria,”
says James, “somewhere we
can realize our dream of living
above ground.”
Around January 2002, the
average price of a detached
house in Metro Vancouver
was $390,000. That has since
nearly tripled to $1.1 million.
For those who couldn’t or
didn’t buy in—who were out-
bid, came late to the party, or
sat it out waiting for a massive
market correction—real estate
has been a dismal science. This
July, the MLS listed only 24
two-bedroom condos for sale
under $300,000. That’s the
maximum mortgage available
to a household earning the me-
dian family income; Vancouver
proper has about 30,000 renter
households in that category.
The story of real-estate af-
fordability here can be told in
that one stat: in a city of over
600,000 people, two dozen
bottom-of-the-barrel starter
condos available for sale to the
middle class.
Tina and James are part
of what, real-estate-wise,
might be called Vancouver’s
Generation Fucked. As the
city becomes a global “lifestyle
destination,” tens of thousands
of middle-class households are
getting a hard lesson in dimin-
ished expectations. Unless the
members of Gen F want to
raise their children in a one-
bedroom condo, their salaries
will qualify them to be no more
than permanent renters in Van-
couver. This is a well-known
phenomenon in cities like Paris
and New York, but it’s a recent
development here, one taking
an entire cohort in their 20s,
30s, and 40s by surprise.
My wife and I also rent a
basement suite in Vancouver,
and occasionally we shake
our heads that we’re pushing
40 and living in a space that
barely notches above student
housing. For a long while we’d
been looking down our noses
at people shelling out what
seemed to be exorbitant prices
for tiny, well-marketed proper-
ties. We waited, a bit haugh-
tily, for the oft-predicted crash
to bring prices back down to
our level. While waiting in
this particular basement for
the past three years, we’ve paid
$40,000 to our landlord.
As basements go, ours is
fine, no mould-spore filter re-
quired. But it’s hard not to feel
churlish when the subject of
real estate comes up. At par-
ties, we sip from the house
cocktail shared by many young
(and not-so-young) middle-
class renters in Vancouver: two
parts seething resentment, one
part liberal guilt. To protest
too much about our situation
seems bourgeois, given we eat
organic vegetables, drink good
wine, and go on vacation every
few months. We blunt our bit-
terness by counting our bless-
ings, which are many—and it’s
hard to stir a revolt on a full
stomach and a glass of Merlot.
One thing that has changed
in the past year is our perspec-
tive: we no longer believe a
crash is inevitable, or that it
would make any real differ-
ence to us. Like one of those
Re/Max balloons, prices have
risen so far out of our reach
that even if they deflated sig-
nificantly we still couldn’t get
on board. Yet on our incomes,
as a childless couple, we have
a choice. Unlike James and
Tina, we just might be able to
purchase a property that suits
our needs. Or we could leave.
Among the emigrants join-
ing us might be Leif and Heidi.
Leif, 31, is an intern architect,
and Heidi, 32, a full-time stu-
dent at Emily Carr. Former
Winnipeggers, they had already
owned homes in Saskatoon and
Winnipeg when they arrived in
Vancouver in 2009, bringing
with them $75,000 in equity.
Despite their modest income,
they were optimistic that their
good fortune in the real-estate
market on the Prairies would
set them up for a decent fix-
er-upper in Vancouver. They
quickly realized their income
and savings would only buy
them a one-bedroom condo—
if that.
“Coming here was a slap
in the face,” says Leif. “We
thought we were lucky getting
that down payment together,
but it’s pennies here.” Recently
he spotted a new one-bedroom
in Kitsilano for $300,000; to
prove a point, he went on MLS
and found a home in Winni-
peg for the same price: an old-
stock character house with
four bedrooms and two baths
on three floors. It was 2,400
square feet; the Kits condo was
400. “The longer I’m out here,
the more I’m convinced this
market is unstoppable. If this
was any other regional city,
prices would adjust. But that’s
not how it is here,” he says. “I
don’t want to sound like we’re
feeling sorry for ourselves, be-
cause we could happily move
back. But we realized that Van-
couver is not a regional mar-
ket. Real-estate-wise, it’s not
really Canada anymore.”
Alex and Erin are also
doubtful about their future.
Smart, practical, and into the
city’s culture of dining, out-
doors, and high-tech, they’re
the Everycouple of Gen F’s
20-somethings. They rent a
500-square-foot apartment in
Hastings-Sunrise and love liv-
ing in Vancouver—even if it
means having a living room
not much larger than a snooker
table. Alex, 28, is a young chef
whomovedherefromMedicine
Hat in 2005. After completing
Gone
Alex, 28, cooks at
Hawksworth in the Hotel Georgia.
Erin, 26, is a freelance publicist
TrevorBrady
When Vancouver starts
paying like New York, maybe
the housing situation here will
become more manageable”
‘‘

3. 7 2 va n m a g . c o m N o v e m b e r 2 0 11 n o v e m b e r 2 0 11 va n m a g . c o m 7 3
culinary school in January, he
was hired at the new Hawks-
worth restaurant in the Rose-
wood Hotel Georgia. Erin, who
grew up in North Vancouver, is
26 and until recently was a pr
manager at 1-800-GOT-JUNK.
A Twitter lover, she broadcasts
their gourmet experiments
to the world in 140-character
bites. They’ve chosen careers
that tie them to Vancouver, or
a city of this size, and necessity
aside they enjoy the city’s vibe.
They’re not optimistic about
putting down roots. As a cook
in an upscale restaurant, Alex
can count on earning around
$29,000 a year. Erin makes
more with freelance copywrit-
ing and PR, but not much. “To-
gether we make about $70,000,
which sounds like a healthy
combined income at our age,”
Erin says, “and we’re not desti-
tute. What frustrates us is that
there’s no way to look at grow-
ing wealth or security while
living in this city, making what
we make—which anywhere
else would be considered a re-
ally good living.” They’d like to
buy a condo in five years or so,
but that’s a stretch. “It would
have to be in Port Moody
or something, which means
you’re commuting. Even if we
lived on macaroni and cheese
for three years, we couldn’t
make it work here.”
As real-estate prices have ris-
en, median-wage households
have been pummelled by Van-
couver’s shift from a resource-
based economy to a tourism-
and-service mix. (If you work
in the mining or forestry in-
dustry in B.C., your average
weekly wage is about $1,200;
in hotels or food service, it’s
around $400.) Gen F’ers are
paying off student loans and
financing stratospheric mort-
gages in a city with few large
firms or corporate headquar-
ters. And due to aging Boomers
who stay in their jobs longer,
there are fewer jobs available
for experienced workers in
their 30s and 40s. Erin has
over $40,000 in student debt
from her UBC years and her
Kwantlen diploma, and while
pr was a consciously practical
choice, getting ahead is tough.
“The pr departments are small
to begin with, unlike in To-
ronto,” she says. “So there are
piles of people coming in at ju-
nior levels who can’t move up
because people aren’t moving
out of senior positions—the
director has been there for five
or 10 years and will be for at
least another 10.”
Generation F is leaving the
city just when its members
become most valuable, cre-
atively and economically. Mi-
chael Heeney is a principal of
Bing Thom Architects, whose
research arm, BTA Works,
studies affordability and oth-
er urban issues. BTA attracts
“fantastic” young architects
to Vancouver early in their
careers—“the best and bright-
est” from around the world.
The dilemma many employ-
ers face, says Heeney, is that
once their employees want to
have a family in their 30s and
early 40s, they leave the city.
“When they have one child in
a two-bedroom apartment they
can get away with it, but as the
child gets older, or they have a
second child, it really doesn’t
work very well here.” When
they leave, he notes, they don’t
go to Surrey and commute, but
light out for distant centres like
Chicago. “These are people
who are at their absolute most
valuable, because they’ve been
working in the business for 10
or 15 years. They’re the back-
bone, the boiler room of your
business. And we’re losing that
investment. In many ways, our
most significant export is tal-
ented people.”
Heather Tremain, former
CEO of green building con-
sultancy and development
company reSource Rethinking
Building, is now a commu-
nity development consultant.
She says she’s been “over-
whelmed” by stories of young
professionals leaving the city.
“There are so many people
with great skill sets, really the
emerging leaders of this city,
who are leaving because they
can’t have kids and live here,”
says Tremain. “They can’t af-
ford the accommodation. It’s
partly a generation gap, where
all these people came of pur-
chasing age at a point when
the market took off. It’s just
bad luck, bad timing.”
Some dispute claims that
young families and profession-
als are leaving in droves, in-
sisting the stats don’t support
it. And indeed, the proportion
of people aged 20 to 40 in
Vancouver lines up with the
rest of the province. “It’s hard
to measure the people who’ve
left, because they’re not there
to measure,” notes Tremain.
“But you can look at school
enrollments, which are declin-
ing in Vancouver but growing
in Surrey.” What the provin-
cial numbers may be cloaking
is a phenomenon of mass-scale
gentrification, whereby people
with oodles of money—the in-
dependently wealthy, or those
who can work remotely—are
arriving from elsewhere and
displacing existing residents
with Vancouver-based jobs.
The city acts as a revolving
door, attracting young people
in their 20s, then turning them
back to where they came from
or to another urban centre as
they reach the family years.
For those who grew up in
Vancouver, of course, there’s
no revolving door—only an
exit sign. “This,” says Michael
Heeney, “is the double-edged
sword of being the most liv-
able city in the world.”
U
rban planners
talk about “the
housing con-
tinuum,” with
homeless shel-
ters at one end
and purchased
condos and detached homes
at the other. Rental stock—
TrevorBrady
We
feel foolish
being hopeful
for so many
years. Maybe
we should
have given up
sooner and
just left”
Gone
James , 35, teaches music at a
South Vancouver elementary school.
Tina, 34, is a stay-at-home mum to
Sophia, 3, and twin baby boys
‘‘

4. 7 4 va n m a g . c o m N o v e m b e r 2 0 11
CourtesyOptionsforHomes
from social housing to leased
condo units—is in the middle.
For Vancouver, that spectrum
has more than common com-
plexity, because our city has
the highest share of low-in-
come households per capita in
Canada and a sizable homeless
population, around 2,600 peo-
ple. Combined with our high
real-estate prices, these social
realities mean that creating
affordable housing is less an
art than a form of ecosystem
management. “Affordability is
our single greatest challenge,”
acknowledges Brent Tode-
rian, director of city planning.
“There’s never been a time
when Vancouver hasn’t been
working very hard in progres-
sive ways to address it.”
When Vancouver planners
talkaboutincreasingaffordabil-
ity, they’re talking mainly about
helping the city’s most vulnera-
ble—what Toderian calls “deep
affordability.” In the past three
years, the city has reduced
street homelessness by over 80
percent with easier-access shel-
ter beds. But those nearer the
middle of the continuum also
face grave challenges. Over
20,000 households in Vancou-
ver—one-third of them home
owners—pay over half their
income toward housing, mak-
ing them vulnerable to evic-
tion and default. Demand for
new rental properties in Metro
Vancouver exceeds 6,600 units
per year, but tax laws and other
factors make it hard for devel-
opers to earn a profit on rental
units, which means hardly any-
one builds them. Over the past
decade developers have built
on average only about 1,000
purpose-built rental suites per
year, running short of demand
by about 50,000 units. That’s
why the city of Vancouver is
scrambling to enable second-
ary rental suites like basements
and laneway housing.
To help renters, the city
has deployed policies like the
Rate of Change program that
prevents rental buildings from
being torn down without
replacement—or the now-
defunct Short-Term Incentives
for Rental program that re-
warded developers for build-
ing rental units. The policies
are progressive and important,
though they’ve done little more
than stave off decline. Back in
the ’80s Vancouver planners
created their 20 Percent policy,
a now almost-forgotten pro-
gram that should have worked
better than it did: still in place,
it requires that developers of
new neighbourhoods like East
Fraser­lands set aside 20 per-
cent of buildable space for af-
fordable housing. In the early
’90s it worked some miracles,
using a mix of federal and
provincial cash to build 1,300
units of affordable housing in
Coal Harbour and Concord
Pacific Place, among other
neighbourhoods—embedding
social diversity and affordable
As Gen F looks for
real-estate security, they
might learn a new acronym.
MEEs (Mission Entrepre-
neurial Entities) blend profit
and not-for-profit motives
to build affordable housing.
Seen in overpriced cities
the world over, a few are
evolving locally.
The Affordable Home­
ownership Trust aims to
finance a novel approach to
condo ownership, inspired
by Whistler, Silicon Valley,
and Fort McMurray. Begun
by the Vancouver Native
Housing Society, the multi-
family developments—not
only for aboriginal people—
will comprise around 100
units, half sold at market
value and half at up to 50
percent off. A microfinanc-
ing approach to solicit funds
from businesses and the
public will create a pool of
interest-free capital. “It’s not
philanthropy we’re asking
for,” says CEO Dave Eddy.
“It’s social responsibility
based on a business case.”
Vancity has acted as a
MEE on some recent afford-
able-housing experiments,
including 60 West Cordova
in Gastown and the SFU
development Verdant. Com-
pleted in 2007, Verdant was
meant to attract staff and
faculty turned off by high
real-estate prices; by cutting
land prices it sold two-thirds
of the family-size units for 80
percent of market value. At
60 West Cordova, Vancity
partnered with developer
Westbank to offer condo
units to residents, workers,
and volunteers in the Down-
town Eastside at 75 percent
of market value. A dozen
were also discounted further
and sold to the Portland
Hotel Society and Habitat
for Humanity.
The MEE with the most
experience in Canada may
be Options for Homes, a
Toronto-based nonprofit that
has built $400 million worth
of affordable-ownership
units in Toronto and Montreal
since 1997. By pouncing
on cheaper land in up-and-
coming areas—and leaving
out expensive swimming
pools, gyms, parking stalls,
and third-party marketing
plans—OFH is able to offer
deep discounts. Where a
traditional Toronto developer
might charge $290,000 for
a 775-square-foot, two-
bedroom in an emerging
neighbourhood, OFH can
offer the same unit for about
$190,000.—T.B.
Gone
Keeping upwith the Joneses
The Village by High Park,
on Toronto’s West Side. This
Options for Homes project
offered 607 units, ranging
from 495 sq. ft. ($123,760)
to 1,000 sq. ft. ($247,000)

5. 7 6 va n m a g . c o m N o v e m b e r 2 0 11
housing in otherwise uniform-
lyspendyareas.ButwhenBrian
Mulroney pulled the funding
on social housing in the early
’90s, the program faltered. De-
velopers like Concord Pacific
and ParkLane Homes have set
aside airspace and dirt for over
2,000 units under 20 Percent,
but it’s questionable whether
the units will ever be built.
If people like Tina and
James, and Leif and Heidi, and
my wife and I are hoping city
or provincial governments will
help us move up into home
ownership, we’re out of luck.
Once people are employed
and decently housed, the city
lets them go their way; in the
triage of Vancouver housing,
high real-estate values are a
concern but not a priority.
“Home ownership is at the top
of our affordability continuum,
where the bottom is literally
people living on the streets,”
says Toderian. “Increasingly,
in a city as expensive as ours,
it’s about affordable living, not
affordable ownership. We’re
making sure people have the
opportunity to live affordably
in the city, in everything from
rent to daycare. But not to
own, necessarily.”
Over the next decade, the city
has committed to help build
39,000 housing units. “The
three most important words
with affordable ownership,”
says Toderian, “are supply, sup-
ply, supply.” An increased sup-
ply sounds reassuring, but the
current projections barely keep
up with projected population
growth—and nearly half of
new units are bought by inves-
tors, who turn them into rent-
als. From the city’s perspective,
investors are a blessing: they
own 35 percent of condo suites
and provide over 17,000 units
of rental housing. “That’s been
a positive thing,” says Toderian.
“We’d have a harder housing
challenge if we didn’t have it.”
But investor-owned condo
stock is more expensive than
purpose-built rental, he adds,
and it’s vulnerable to mass sell-
offsifinterestratesrise.Thecity
would like to get more owner-
ship properties into the market
to mitigate price increases, says
Toderian, but it’s not easy. “To
some extent the market ‘self-
regulates’ how much it puts
out there. And the city work-
load around getting supply ap-
proved in a high-quality form
with meaningful public input
is more than a handful.” For-
mer councillor Peter Ladner
has suggested a different ap-
proach to the problem: the city,
he says, should mandate that
when single-family houses are
torn down—offshore investors
tend to replace heritage homes
with big-box mansions—they
must be replaced with duplex-
es or triplexes.
A city increasingly composed
of median-income renters wid-
ens the gap between rich and
poor. As new members of the
middle class are pushed into
rental units, they boost the
fortunes of existing property
owners while depleting their
own, whether their landlords
are the people living upstairs,
offshore condo investors, or
funds like Great-West Life. And
this is where things start to top-
ple. When prices heat up, the
middle class eats up units that
would previously have been
occupied by moderate- to low-
income earners. “Moderate-in-
come people in Vancouver are
moving into student housing,”
says councillor Heather Deal.
“Students are moving into wel-
fare apartments in the Down-
town Eastside. And the home-
less are popping out the bottom
of the system.”
T
here seems little
hope that Gener-
ation F will steal
a happy ending
from a depress-
ing decade. A
market drop of
40 percent—as seen in several
U.S. cities in the real-estate
meltdown—still wouldn’t put
a median-income family with-
in reach of a three-bedroom
home in Vancouver. If there’s
an upside to the crunch, it’s
that we’re entertaining new
ideas about home ownership
and beginning to make real-
estate prices an election issue.
Vancouver isn’t the first place
to experience a permanent real-
estate spike, nor the first to re-
alize that high real-estate values
are both a social and economic
problem. During the dot-com
boom of the 1990s, housing
prices in Santa Clara County,
the cradle of Silicon Valley,
shot up so high that even com-
panies offering plum upper-
management jobs couldn’t at-
tract talent. In 1998, a group of
tech companies—led by Intel
with a $1-million investment,
then more millions from Ado-
be, Cisco, and others—joined
with housing activists and lo-
cal governments to create the
nonprofit Santa Clara Housing
Trust. Combining public and
private funds, the scht has
leveraged $1.8 billion over the
past decade to create affordable
rentals and home-ownership
units for 9,000 people of vary-
ing incomes. It hasn’t solved af-
fordability in Santa Clara, but it
has chipped away at it and pro-
vided a promising model.
Inspired by various mod-
els—in Silicon Valley, Whis-
tler, and Toronto—affordable-
ownership pilots are starting
to spring up in Vancouver. (See
sidebar, page 74.) Toderian ap-
proves of such projects but is
not convinced they’ll add up
to anything significant or ulti-
mately change the Vancouver
market. “We can do a lot more
of those projects, but it’s going
to be a drop in the bucket,” he
says, adding that experiments
in places like Whistler aren’t
necessarily transferable to
Vancouver. “You won’t be able
to build enough of these pilots
to change the nature of afford-
able ownership in this city.”
Tim Wake respectfully dis-
agrees. Wake, who worked
with the Whistler Housing Au-
thority from 1997 to 2005 and
was recently appointed ceo
of Habitat for Humanity of
Greater Vancouver, thinks the
city has yet to really explore
the possibilities for afford-
able home ownership. “It’s not
widely known that between
1996 and 2011 Whistler solved
its affordable-housing prob-
lem,” he says. “It’s no longer a
significant problem for Whis-
tler. Not a lot of communities
can say they’ve done that.”
As Vancouver increasingly
resembles a massive resort
community for wealthy retirees
and investor-class immigrants
who want a mild climate and
good golfing, we may have
something to learn from Whis-
tler, which spent two decades
struggling to house working
families. Five years ago, few
people wanted to hear lessons
from Whistler about afford-
able ownership, Wake says, but
things have changed. “Vancou-
ver planners and officials were
very focused on rental hous-
ing, and some didn’t think that
what Whistler was doing with
worker housing was relevant.
But housing pressures similar
to those affecting resort towns
appear to be happening here
now. Many working people are
getting fed up, and they want to
hear about creative solutions.”
He does agree with Toderian
on some points. “You can’t
just take what Whistler did or
Santa Clara did and transplant
it. We need to find our own
ways to hook on to the engine
of development to produce af-
fordable home ownership.”
For Wake, the best solutions
boil down to increased density
paired with what are called
“covenanted deeds,” whereby
units are bought—and later
sold—below market value.
Owners who sign these deeds
don’t reap all the windfalls of
a runaway market, but they’re
able to capture some gains
along with the equity they’ve
paid to their mortgage. “The
Gone

6. 7 8 va n m a g . c o m N o v e m b e r 2 0 11
beauty of a market-based ap-
proach is that it does not rely
heavily on government sub-
sidy. The strong real-estate
market in Vancouver, the
very thing that is causing the
affordable-housing problem,
can also provide solutions.”
Vancouver’s affordable-
ownership micro-projects are
in their infancy, and scaling
them up will take years. The
greatest shift we’ll see may be
one of expectations. “There
are many world cities where
ownership is simply not an
option,” says Brent Toderian.
In London or Hong Kong, he
points out, “you don’t think
about buying, you don’t re-
ally even think of renting a
place on your own. It’s a bit
of a North American thing to
think about affordability in
terms of this dream of owner-
ship.” As people realize that
real-estate prices are not going
to revert to 2002 levels, Tode-
rian counsels the need not for
mass exodus, but for a shift in
culture and attitude.
So does David Smith,
founder of Boston’s Affordable
Housing Institute, an “action-
oriented consultancy” that
advises governments on hous-
ing policy and promotes af-
fordable housing projects. He
sees the Vancouver market as
ripe for a correction, but says
prices will likely rebound and
in the long term remain high.
“It doesn’t go the other way
once a city attracts that inter-
nationalattention,”saysSmith.
“Thirty years ago, San Diego
was seen as a small town; now
it’s a major city.” Smith also
points out that what Vancou-
verites are experiencing is a
common problem globally. “If
you live in the big city, you
live in a smaller space. That a
teacher cannot afford to live in
the city she teaches in, that’s
common in cities all over. ”
If you want to retain medi-
an-income workers and avoid
having the city divide into
penthouses and slums, which
Smith says is a natural pro-
gression of economic forces
in cities, government has to
step in by scaling up innova-
tive programs. “You can’t rely
only on market forces. If the
government doesn’t do any-
thing, poorer people have to
live an hour out of town or in
substandard housing.”
But focusing government in-
tervention on the hardest-hit
is not enough for middle-class
earners like Erin. “Saying that
it’s too bad about high prices
and you should be resigned to
renting is to me inconsiderate
and frankly a little ridiculous
in a city with no real support
or protection for renters,” she
says, adding that other expen-
sive cities—Vienna, for one—
have long-established advo-
cacy systems for tenants.
“How is it really a home
when a landlord can evict you
to do ‘upgrades’ to get around
rent-increase limitations, or
when they tell you you can’t
have pets? As a renter you’ve
got very little security, which
is not the way most people
want to start a life for them-
selves, let alone a family.”
“We could probably find a
larger basement suite,” says
James, the Point Grey music
teacher with three kids. “But
after more than a decade of
living in basement suites in
order to save for a down pay-
ment, I want to feel more like
an adult and less like a mole.
Tina and I don’t want to ‘settle
into a lifetime of rental.’ We
want to feel like we’re a real
part of the city. We want to
put down roots.” VM
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