I Bought a House and Became Part of the Problem

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Published 6:30, APRIL 13, 2026

I never expected to own a home. I wasn’t born into generational wealth. I grew up poor. There was—and is—no big family inheritance coming my way. Not property. Not cash. Not stocks or bonds or whatever financial instrument one might trade or sell or leverage to join the landed class. I haven’t experienced the sort of professional success that makes property ownership possible. Years of education and advanced degrees, column inches in mainstream platforms, and occasional admittance into rooms filled with the high priests and priestesses of the upper crust pay the bills. They don’t secure a mortgage.

My eyes were fixed on simple goals. Live here or there or anywhere—not quite blowing with the wind but ready to pack up and leave when the building got too rundown or the owners decided it was time to “move back in” or “renovate.” I accepted my lot. “Every time I read some weekend column about a boomer struggling to retire on $100,000 a year and a multi-million-dollar home,” I wrote on (then) Twitter in 2019, “I’m reminded that my retirement plan is to die in the climate wars.” That joke often makes it back into the discourse through some byway. It holds up.

The tweet might also hold up for Canadians who followed the prescribed path for professional success—names you’ll never read in print or hear on the radio but who are coping with the resentment that comes with having committed no sin except being born into the wrong time. While roughly two-thirds of the country owned their own home as we neared the first quarter of this new century, the number varies by age. In Better Dwelling, a Vancouver-based news outlet focused on Canadian housing, Stephen Punwasi reports the homeownership rate for those aged twenty-five to forty-four—a category into which I currently fall—peaked four decades ago. Then, between 2011 and 2021, it fell by at least five points.

No surprise why. Since 2000, the cost of homeownership in Canada has risen 300 percent. In February of this year, the average selling price for a home in Canada was just over $663,000—and far higher in Toronto, at just over a million dollars, and Vancouver, at $1.25 million. Average wages from 1998 to 2021 haven’t gone up nearly as much. According to Statistics Canada, the average wage has increased just 23 percent. That’s less than a tenth of the growth in the cost of buying a home.

The myth that hard work and prudent saving will land you a house may be fully in retreat. You can’t always work hard enough to make the math work. Even when the housing market cools, it’s expected to come roaring back soon enough. No, the myth is indeed a fable. If you want to own a home, you have to win the lottery. And I did.

Despite decades of struggle and resignation, I hit the jackpot by falling in love. We moved in together. Or, more precisely, I moved in with her. She had been able to secure a home because of a confluence of favourable circumstances, including a good job, hard work, getting into the market at the right time, and help from family. I became the beneficiary of that. Twice over, really, since later we bought a home together.

Signing mortgage documents alongside her brought a sense of accomplishment. I was a kid who escaped the orbit of his family’s less-than-modest means and joined the landed gentry. I also felt guilt. I was thinning out supply, bidding up values, and scoring some stability, while others, priced out of the market, were left to military-crawl into the latter half of their life. Even with a home and a new job as a book editor, I doubt I’ll ever retire. But beggars and choosers and all that.

Buying a house is not only something people do but something they are told they ought to do. With that dream in place, you start to think you’re missing the train if you don’t hop on board. You’re promised that wherever it’s going, it’s good. That sense of momentum comes easier for some. There is a generational dynamic to the related challenges of housing affordability, investment, and retirement. But at their core, they’re as much a class problem as anything. You’re either in the right class or you’re not. And if not, it’s the lottery or bust.

Our house is, first and foremost, where we live. It’s where I salt the front walkway and driveway after having investigated the right substance to use, not wanting to harm the lawn or paving stones or, worse, our dog Sam. It’s where we receive friends and family and put them up in the guest room—a major selling point—which Sam has claimed when not occupied by visitors. It’s where we gave candy to 360 trick-or-treaters on our first Halloween, and when the supply finally ran out, we rushed to kill the lights before the next wave arrived.

Buying the place was an adventure, equal parts exciting and harrowing. It wasn’t exactly an impulse purchase, but close. We’d already met with a financial planner to make the goal a part of our long-term dream, something for which we’d prepare, save, and diligently work toward. We spent hours researching online, and each new listing pushed us to act sooner rather than later. We went to open houses. We mulled. But nothing fit—until something did.

I’d spied the single-family detached almost as soon as it went up. We visited it without delay. The wide floorboards were wood—real wood. The windows were big and bright. The refrigerator dispensed ice and water; growing up, visiting the home of a friend who had such a thing was like a peek at how the other half—or, rather, top decile—lived. The extra rooms would allow us each to work from home, each in our own private space, with one left over for frequent guests. In my office, which looks out onto the street, a padded bench built into the wall would be where Sam would keep watch over the premises as I typed away all day.

We left after the showing and saw a few more houses nearby. But when you know, you know—and you worry that others might know too. As my grandfather would say, piss or get off the pot. We made an offer a few hours later on The One. The sellers accepted it soon after. The place, listed on a Thursday, was ours the following Friday.

My own domestic life has subsequently undergone financialization, but that bit remains abstract. I don’t think about my partner any differently, other than having an even deeper sense of joy and gratitude that we’ve undertaken this commitment together. I don’t think about money differently either. I paid rent for decades. Paying down a mortgage feels no different, even though I now have equity, and control.

My brain still tells me that the monthly cash I fork over is the hard cost of living. I don’t ever expect that process to end, even though someday it will—if the house gets paid off and I’m still kicking and writing and editing. But even imagining that final payment feels strange, because it won’t mark freedom so much as a new phase in the life cycle of a financial asset. It’s a reminder that “home” never stops being something the market gets to define.

I’m not sure what policymakers thought would happen when they allowed housing to become the ultimate commodity. The consequences, however, were entirely predictable: real estate investment trusts, mortgage-securitization schemes, institutional landlords, and pension funds all rushed in, chasing returns.

It also drew another player: ordinary homeowners. I don’t have a tonne to sink into blue-chip stocks or basket securities or whatever people do with their money to make more money. What I have is our patch of ground, and it’s the one thing I can simultaneously invest and live in. It’s a twofer. You can’t say that about a mutual fund.

As traditional retirement supports erode, more Canadians are leaning on their homes to fill the gap. In 2022, the proportion of Canadian workers covered by a registered pension plan—a retirement scheme through an employer or union—was 37.5 percent, half a point lower than the year before. Since 2002, that rate has never passed 40 percent.

These numbers are nowhere near high enough. Pensions are deferred wages, or de facto paycheques from a past self to a future self. Roughly two-thirds of these covered workers enjoy a defined benefit pension plan in which the benefits are set out ahead of time—members know specifically how much they’ll get and when, which makes planning for the future much easier and more reliable. For those without pensions or independent means, the future is nothing but risk and uncertainty. That’s a miserable way to live.

Until recently, I belonged in that group. As a freelance, self-employed journalist, I didn’t have an employer pension plan. I employed myself. I added to a Registered Retirement Savings Plan, and I paid into the Canada Pension Plan. But even that would not have been enough to keep the waters calm as I age.

A 2024 study released by the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP), one of Canada’s largest public sector pension funds, found that more than one in four Canadians plan to keep working after retirement. The survey, conducted by Abacus Data, also explains why. Twice as many respondents reported saving nothing in the past year, and only 43 percent said they earn enough to prepare for life after the workforce. Thirteen percent expect to work indefinitely.

For those intending to retire, pension or not, HOOPP found 42 percent of homeowners expect to draw on their home to get by. That’s up four points over 2023. Millions of Canadians, in other words, absolutely need home prices to stay sky high. That means abetting a logic that, in the long run, calls for constraints on supply and insulates property values. On a strict accounting of maximizing returns, then, my future plans—our plans—would be in direct tension with home affordability, making us complicit.

Worse than complicit, we’ve helped create a Canadian economy in our image. The housing market is worth about $300 billion a year and accounts for roughly 13.2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product—more than manufacturing, more than oil and gas, more than mining, and more than health care. In the third quarter of 2023, according to Better Dwelling, residential investment alone accounted for nearly 8 percent of the country’s GDP, four points higher than in the United States.

As Punwasi puts it, Canada’s economy is “dangerously concentrated” in housing stock. That concentration creates and preserves incentives that brook little to no structural reform. Which elected official, after all, is going to play Russian roulette with their career, not to mention with the hundreds of billions of dollars tied up in a single sector of the economy? Homeowners are voters—voters who expect their equity to be protected and their property values to keep rising. Woe to any politician who messes with that.

My partner and I joke that we’re never moving again. Still, profiting from scarcity could be a part of my retirement plan, just as it is for the millions of Canadians who plan to sell their home at a profit. That’s how our system, both by design and policy, works. I don’t care for it. I’d rather that dynamic change at scale. But, for now, I’m bound up in it.

• The Housing Market Isn’t for Single People
• The End of Retirement
• No One Wants to Buy a Condo

Bound up is another way of saying: I’m part of the problem. I sometimes draw on the lefty canard that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. It’s hard not to be complicit in the systems and collective actions that shape your world. You can be better or worse at the margins, but few choose martyrdom. Instead, we consume and contribute to climate change. We pay taxes to a government that does things with that money we’d rather it not do. We buy houses and live in them, and sometimes we sell them for more than we paid and shuffle off into the sunset.

For us—well, see above. We’re going to die within these walls, which relieves some of the guilt. Someone might sell the joint afterward and make a mint. But it won’t be me. And here you sense something of the mindset that fuels financialization, even beyond issues of limited supply. People buy into the market, bid up prices, and then rely on ever-higher valuations to justify their investment, whether it’s for retirement or not. The logic becomes an expectation: numbers should go up, always. And once that expectation locks in, reversing it feels dangerous, even destabilizing.

Paul Kershaw, associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health, calls our dependence on rising home values a “cultural addiction.” We know it produces inequality and exclusion, but we just can’t stop, because too much depends on it. This explains the policies we adopt, or don’t. For instance, we don’t tax the profit you make on selling your principal residence—though we could. That would cool the market, but it would cost people a lot of money. Few serious politicians are going to suggest it, especially since most of them are likely in the same boat as other homeowners who don’t want to pay taxes on wealth gains. So the market stays overheated, because god forbid anyone in power be seen as hostile to the Canadian dream of owning a home (you can’t afford).

Indeed, worse than letting the addiction take hold, governments have actively enabled it. They’ve caved to the NIMBY set, gummed up new builds, abandoned public housing, and goosed demand with policy offerings such as special savings accounts for first-time buyers, favourable tax treatment for housing wealth, and longer mortgage amortization periods (or smaller monthly payments over more years).

“We are asking people to protect our nest egg, our retirement security, by accepting a much lower standard of living,” says Kershaw, who founded Generation Squeeze in 2012, now a self-described “think and change tank” focused on generational fairness. On housing, the group argues that governments have prioritized protecting property values despite knowing younger Canadians are being squeezed out of the market. “The only way something becomes a wealth windfall for one generation,” he says, “is for it to become more out of reach for those who follow.” Rising home prices are treated as a collective good, something to celebrate, no matter whom it harms or how short sighted the gains.

Breaking addiction is hard work. Shifting our shared obsession away from real estate as a retirement investment will require a series of measures, and time. It will mean building affordable rentals or homes (via public, non-profit, or co-op sectors at below-market prices). It will require the political fortitude to levy higher property taxes on suburban owners who ought to pay the full cost of their choices. It will involve creating a long period of rising incomes and stable housing prices to ensure long-term affordability. And it will demand a stronger retirement system—beyond Old Age Security, RRSPs, and the CPP.

I’m all for this. Housing unaffordability is an indictment of this country. It is a problem left unchecked for decades by local, provincial, and national governments. Everyone deserves the security and the control that come with ownership. And if I must amend my future plans so more Canadians can afford a home, then all the better. Perhaps I’ll barely notice. I’ll probably be sitting at this very desk where I’m typing out these words, looking out the window where our neighbourhood has become our community.

The work will continue, as will the rituals and exigencies of homeownership: replacing the big and bright windows as they age, refinishing the wide floorboards after they’ve been trod upon over the course of decades by the guests who visit, salting the walkway and driveway into the decades where a potential fall is less an inconvenience than a mortal threat. Perhaps in those coming years, my lingering guilt will abate. Perhaps the market will change, not of its own volition or the volition of owners but that of policymakers who decide that Canada ought to be a country in which houses are well and truly homes.

Sam sits on that padded bench now. She’s getting older. Someday too soon, she won’t be there. In the early months of living here, she’d get worked up as other dogs passed by and scratch the wood of the windowsill. Training her to ignore other pups was, and still is, a long-term goal. Short term, I bought acrylic runners to cover the vulnerable section. Some days, I sit on the bench and look at the scratch marks beneath the acrylic and reflect on how, by accident, I’ve made this little spot of our home an exhibit, a lacerated memory, an imperfection I’ll never fix nor forget.