SaltWire E-Edition

Feeling the downtown housing squeeze

MADELINE BURY

It was a perfectly regular Monday afternoon. I had just chatted with the police and filed a complaint about the Airbnb guest next door who had opened my mail and left it in the street. Earlier, I had also received a no-reason termination notice for the beloved downtown apartment my partner and I have shared for two years.

Our landlord wants to live in our apartment while he renovates his own apartment upstairs, so it’s into the terrifying rental market we go. We’re young millennials, so home ownership is very far away, and we have to be out of here in three months.

I had just sat down on my couch for a much-needed mental-health break when I heard someone screaming bloody murder. With no discernible source, I yelled into the street through cupped hands, “Whoever’s screaming, are you OK?”

A woman with a cherry red face popped out of the house across the street and filled me in. Her cat had fallen out the second-storey window and was trapped in the network of tiny downtown backyards below. They lived in the upstairs apartment and underneath was another Airbnb with no one home, and no one who was easily reachable.

I put on my shoes and followed her to a bathroom window overlooking a little scrap of rooftop. From the roof, I climbed down mismatched fences into an unkempt field of knotweed and more than once heard the little rip in my jumper get bigger.

The little orange cat eventually made it most of the way back on her own and only needed me to hoist her back into the arms of her tearful and terrified mama.

In a feat of remarkable athleticism, I climbed back up the nexus of fences and through the bathroom window.

My neighbour, cat safely in her arms, and now with her partner home for comfort, thanked me profusely and showed me back out.

Her door stuck, and so did my mind. I looked at the door to the downstairs apartment, the Airbnb. It had a new, outside door with a new, complex, code-style lock. I closed the door I had just come out of — a wooden, internal door with just a deadbolt.

I walked outside and looked straight at my own home, flanked by row houses on either side, each with professional cleaners on their way out with garbage bags and vacuum cleaners — they were being readied for my next temporary neighbours.

When I suggested to the owner of the Airbnb next door that he might leave his guest a bad review for going through my mail, or include a note to future guests about respecting the neighbourhood (would you believe this isn’t the first incident?), he kindly told me not to tell him how to run his business.

I may not be qualified to tell him how to run his Airbnb — I’m happy to concede that point. But I did rescue a cat today, and I’m qualified to be a good neighbour. Where will your guests find the quaint, authentic neighbourhood you’ve sold them when I’m not qualified for that, either?

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2022-08-10T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-10T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://saltwire.pressreader.com/article/281517934894577

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