- by Anne Finlay-Stewart, Editor

Once upon a time we lived in a big house on Hamilton “Mountain” overlooking Lake Ontario. We owned the house because my parents mortgaged their paid-off home in Toronto, gave us cash to buy our Hamilton house, and we paid their mortgage. We were down-the-line recipients of my mother's inheritance and my father's veteran's benefits.

We paid the mortgage in part with rent from our boarders – a variety of students and working people over the years. Some answered ads at the university, others were through Home Share, a matching service run by VON with government support. In a few years we had enough equity to take n our own mortgage.

When we decided to make a trial move to Owen Sound, our boarders stayed in our Hamilton house, paying rent.

We arrived here in October 1994 and found a townhouse for rent on the east hill. The owners had decided to try living at their Miller Lake cottage and commuting in to work in Owen Sound. No one asked us for references, nor proof of employment, credit history or income. Our son started kindergarten at Sydenham, my husband started a job in home care (then run by the Health Unit), and we settled in to life in Owen Sound.

By the spring, the owners of our house had realized they could rent their cottage for more by the week than we were paying for a month, so they gave us notice. Thus began five months of itinerant life.

For June we lived in a furnished cottage at Sauble Beach. The cottage was damp and musty, but the weather was lovely. Of course we could not stay, because July rent was going to quadruple. We rented an A-frame at Chesley Lake (not on the lake)ight-unseen, pushing though from Hamilton to arrive late one night to discover a front door covered in spiders. No sleep that night for my arachniphobe husband, and we stayed only long enough to find something else.

My husband continued to work and lived in bed-and-breakfasts while I went back to Hamilton to prepare to sell the house and pack all the rest of our belongings. This required two reliable vehicles.

By October we had sold our home in Hamilton and bought in Owen Sound, two blocks from the home of the elderly aunt who had introduced us to Owen Sound in the first place.

Over the years home care was privatized in Ontario – public money through for-profit companies. While he continued to do the same work with the same clients, my husband's employer changed five times before he eventually went to Orangeville to work during the week and assist his ailing mother. Had we been looking for a mortgage over those years, the “how long have you been with your current employer?” question could have posed a problem.

We've continued to have boarders on and off, through Y Housing and word of mouth, although our home has long since been paid off and we now live in an east-side bungalow.

If you re-read this story with an eye on the advantages we had in obtaining our housing, you'd find at least a dozen, including family goodwill, credit history, and a portable profession. Unwritten are the factors that have absolutely no relation to any effort  or achievement on our part. Among them, we are white, middle-class, Canadian-born, have an Anglo-Saxon name, speak and write English, have generational wealth.

This is a story of the early 90s, not the 2020s, so we also had low-cost post-secondary education without debt, higher vacancy rates,  lower housing prices, a 10% down-payment and no mortgage stress test.

Comparing the housing history of our young family with one today is apples and oranges. Watch for more housing stories that will help illustrate the issues and perhaps generate ideas for solutions.