Mass Exodus
If this year has a theme, it seems to be all about leaving. Every place I turn I am either learning that dear friends are leaving the city, neighbours are moving away or I land on a garage sale because the residents have decided to move to another province.
The reason everyone is leaving?
It’s too expensive to live here when you have children.
At first, I thought it was just a matter of a few acquaintances who perhaps had gotten fed up with being house poor. To tell you the truth, the people I know who are house poor seem to be the ones who are most insistent that Dix and I jump into the housing market. I’m not quite sure why this is except that perhaps misery loves company. I’m not anxious to deal with a broken water heater or a leaking basement at the same time as paying for daycare. Call me crazy (might as well, many others do).
In fact, it’s more than just being house poor. There are people in our complex, co-workers, friends from other walks of my life that rent and are also leaving this city. Why? Cost of living.
It seems that whether you are renting or not, the cost of raising a family in Victoria is too much. Daycare is too hard to find. Jobs are scarce. Income is not rising with the rest of the market. Family cannot afford to move here to share the burden.
Is this an old story? I’m not sure. Perhaps it is. Whatever the case, I’ve noticed a sharp increase lately – particularly this summer.
And I’m sad.
I love the life we’ve carved out here. We live close to work (my work, anyway) and school. We have wonderful friends (at least, those who are still slugging it out with us here). The climate is beautiful. The air smells sweet. People recycle like it is second nature. I don’t have to explain why I’m against pesticides. Eliza doesn’t know what a cigarette is and Franklin is shocked whenever he sees someone smoking.
This place suits us.
We love it.
But the truth of it is, as every single one of the people I’ve spoken with over the course of this year have said, you just can’t get ahead in this city. You float. If you are lucky, you float. If you are not, you sink deeper and deeper until eventually, the exorbitant cost of moving your entire family to another province, uprooting your life, becomes your only solution.
Will this happen to us as well?
I hope you stay but if you leave, I will certainly understand. Family is the biggest reason we’ve stayed here, followed closely by two stubborn streaks (one each) and basic inertia (or more accurately the lack of same).
Victoria has had its ups and downs but the lack of affordable housing plus a government that keeps trying to wrest every last benefit from our grasp is maddening. One day, we too may just snap but for now, we’re staying put.
I worked at one place where the VP (they had 3 VP and 9 staff…) came back from a trip back east. He returned at bemoaned that they were doing industrial work in the harbour instead of leaving it pretty and pristine like our harbour. He went on to say that living here is a real privilege, almost like it’s a bonus, or the equivalent of earning more cash. So, if you’re stuck in Nanaimo with the smell of the pulp mill, you should be earning more cash because they aren’t Disneyed up as Victoria?
Victoria is pretty, but it’s also pretty expensive. We bought our house as a hedge against inflation. We pay less in our mortgage than friends do in rent. That expensive rent means that renters have to pay a lot simply to live here. When the going rent is $800+, it’s easy to opt for homelessness rather than work hard enough at one or more no-skills jobs to earn enough to stay.
We have thought about cashing out and going somewhere about as pretty, more remote but much cheaper. At our current rate, we will pay off our home in time for me to be put into an old folks home. If we moved, we may possibly own our own home in less than 5 years.
Well, we keep trying to move…it just doesn’t seem to be happening for us…yet. I think this post and the two comments above pretty much say exactly why we want to leave Victoria. I often wish that we could pick up and move back to Omaha (and buy a house in a neighborhood I love, for example:
http://searchne.npdodge.com/index.cfm?action=listing_detail&property_id=21010668&searchkey=a71c983f-061f-c4b1-8566-9e55a0b68db7&npp=20&sr=41)
I love Victoria for all the reasons you listed, but I hope that we can raise our kids to be intelligent and to have good values wherever we go. Honestly we are “floating” now, but the smallest set back could send us sinking pretty fast. Now that Piers is doing well health wise we are just waiting for a chance.
The only solution, really, is Ottawa. The climate is pretty good: short, snow-filled fun winter, full spring, hot summer, and the most beautiful fall you’ve ever seen. Not only do people recycle here, they compost in the city-run program. It’s a pesticide-free city. I love it when the dandelions take over in early summer, actually. So pretty. There are smokers here on the streets. Too close to Quebec, I guess.
Anyway, houses are ridiculously affordable as well.
See? It’s the ONLY solution. Too fucking far, though, right?
Jenn, let me check with my mother-in-law….
Bernice, would that be too far?
Elkford is exactly 6 hours from Edmonton, 3ish from NCalgary. Starting wage at the local mine is probably 80 grand. A typical starter house is 250 grand. There is one pub and two bars. Two of the five restaurants are Chinese? Average cost of teenage babysitter per/hour for date night $6. Average date night with beer and wings is $45 inc said babysitter. Views amazing, under fives programing awesome, pre-school $70/month, 12 hour day care $40p/child, minor hockey and soccer cheap, public swimming $3, public skating free, ski lift ticket $20 adult and $10 for kids and lessons cheap. People are nice and are protective of their town (we actually have an official community plan).
On the other hand you need to recycle downtown and composts are frowned upon due to attracting animals (We live amoungst the wild). People here love to hunt. One must not point and laugh at grown men decked out in camo print clothes saying “I can seeeeee you!” The arts are not at the for front of the community culture. People here like “doing.” You need to travel for shopping which can be paralizing when you buy a fixer uper house or are accostumed to eating international looking foods. And in conclusion…..jobs that need a university education…..don’t come along so often…..and the weather sucks if you don’t like snow and cold.
Just yesterday, I had a long “discussion” (read: argument) with some people at the organic farm where I work regarding non-profit housing co-ops, and my statement that I cannot afford to move into one. The coworkers in question are all younger than I am, and less settled into a domestic routine, and to them the notion of acquiring assets is limited to skills… Which I agree are assets, of course! But owning property is a pretty big asset in this economic system of ours, and at the moment, I’m better off taking advantage of my cheap rent and saving for a down payment on a house.
What I hope to do is to find a duplex, and form a four-person private co-operative with my partner and my two upstairs neighbours. Living together in a semi-shared space these past two years, we’ve learned to work together very well, and I feel very lucky to have them on board with this plan.
That aside, I currently can’t find a physician accepting new patients, while I know two doctors in Toronto who’d take me on, so maybe this city isn’t going to be my long-term home either!
I am officially setting out on a new goal to get myself to Ottawa… somehow… at some point…
What….Elkford didn’t appeal? I shouldn’t have mentioned the cold….nuts.
Elkford does appeal and it wasn’t the cold that dropped it off the list, it was the fact that I would probably be a stay at home parent and Dickson would work at Safeway – or vice versa. Either way, we aren’t suited to move to a small town.
This is where my father chimes in with my lost opportunity to be a small town family doctor.
No doubt. He wouldn’t be working at Safeway, they don’t exsist. You would perhaps be a stay at home parent for a time but would either get an admin job with the mine, climbing the ranks until you were the superintendent of purchasing or with the district of Elkford, where you would be steering the wheels and cogs of democracy, becoming a researcher and expert on what actions a town council can and should take.
Or you could have been Elkford’s other doctor. Our fam doctor is really funny and would have been a great colleague.