- Anne Finlay-Stewart, Editor
If you worked full time at $20/hr. it would take slightly more than 50% of your take-home pay to rent a one-bedroom apartment in this building in the City of Owen Sound. Before hydro or internet or air-conditioning or laundry.
While that is a cold dose of 2021 reality, perhaps more disconcerting was the surreal description of the relationship between this far north-west corner and the rest of the city.
As we are well aware, there is no Sunday bus service in Owen Sound. Nor is there likely to be in the forseeable future, given the facts presented at this week's budget meetings. The last bus of the day is at 6 p.m Monday to Friday; 4 o'clock on Saturdays. The buses are scheduled to run every half hour. According to one local tenant, on a good day, the trip downtown takes 18 minutes. On a bad day, he says the wait alone can be an hour.
It is 3.6 km to Metro, the nearest grocery store, or 4 km to Foodland - a $9.00 to $11 taxi ride each way. There is no bus to the only movie theatre in town; it's an hour's walk, some of it on sidewalk.
We can debate the vibrancy of Owen Sound's downtown on a Sunday. You can eat delicious food in a few of our restaurants and have dessert at the appropriately named Sundays. Some stores and galleries are open – but many are not after owners weighed the cost/benefit of opening seven days a week. The only City-run gallery – the Tom Thomson – is not open on Sunday.
But Owen Sounders know all this. To whom is this little promotional paragraph addressed? Who does Skyline think is considering this Kijiji ad for a one-bedroom apartment on the edge of Owen Sound?
Skyline acquired this building in 2006, in an $8.5 million deal that included four other buildings in the vicinity for a total of 210 units. This was the seventh property purchased by Skyline since amalgamating its holdings into a private Real Estate Investment Trust (“REIT”) earlier that year. Today the Skyline Group of Companies is managing over $5 billion in real property in more than 150 communities across Canada.
And that might be part of the answer. Skyline's marketing is developed from spinning Google results into a picture of a neighbourhood that is desireable to the kind of tenants the company wants to attract. It's close to the waterfront and a downtown of one-of-a-kind shops (as opposed to the big box shopping area promoted by the east hill property owners). Fellow tenants of 575 28th St. West won't bother you with their loud television – they are interested in fresh air, boutique shopping and museums.
This is not a slam against Skyline, or any real estate developers. Whether their target market is Owen Sounders who may be looking for a move into something better than they have, or people moving to the area, these people deserve to have the reality come close to the advertising.
It is not necessarily the advertising that needs to change.
