Thoughts on housing from a young whippersnapper
The Glebe is a great place to live, if you can afford it.
Photo: Christopher Babcock
Op Ed
Thoughts on housing from a young whippersnapper
By Christopher Babcock
I am 25 years old, and I have loved the Glebe ever since I moved here three years ago. I share a pre-war house on Fifth Avenue with four other young professionals. Most of us are in the process of moving from university to work, and I recently began a career with the federal government. By cleaning, cooking, and shopping together, we have made life infinitely better for one another. We also share a single car.
By splitting rent five ways I have been able to afford to live in the Glebe, with all its benefits: the community, the canal, Lansdowne, proximity to downtown, the local parks and small businesses. Yet the sad reality is that Glebe housing will be unaffordable for me once I start a family.
Housing debates in the Glebe seem to be driven by retirees or late-career professionals, many of whom are very knowledgeable and care deeply about their community. The voices of young people are often unheard.
Some in the Glebe have spoken against dense forms of housing such as apartments, low-rises, condos and duplexes. A letter to the editor in the August Glebe Report argued against rental units by stating: “It is important that we offer the next generation a chance at home ownership and give our young families a path forward to a sound investment in their future retirement.” While this is an admirable sentiment, it does not reflect the way that most young people think about housing and retirement.
Dense forms of housing do not threaten the ability of young people to own a future home. Instead, they allow us to save money, avoid long commutes and live in proximity to the services we need. Of course, the Glebe is already one of the densest areas of Ottawa, and new housing comes with trade-offs. There are legitimate reasons to object to projects such as Lansdowne 2.0. However, resistance to new housing should be the exception, not the norm.
Young people want a market in which housing is an accessible right, not a way of building retirement equity. Since 1981, housing prices have risen seven times faster than wages. This is not sustainable, yet it is what the logic of retirement investment demands. When housing becomes an investment, homeowners are incentivized to drive the price of housing higher to create a seller’s market.
Zoning laws and bylaws are used across Canada to restrict the development of new housing and protect pristine neighbourhoods. The results are predictable: housing becomes a scarce good, and prices climb. According to a Scotiabank survey, 58 per cent of Gen Zs now believe that buying a house is unattainable. And it’s not for lack of saving – data from TD Bank and Statistics Canada show that Gen Z saves more for retirement than millennials did at that age. If current trends continue, home ownership will be utterly out of reach for our own future children.
As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in their bestseller Abundance, the irony is that progressive cities in North America talk big on affordable housing but fail to deliver. The same is true of Ottawa. We claim to care about homelessness and poverty, but we lag the rest of the nation when it comes to building. Last year we started only 7,871 homes in a city of 1.5 million. Calgary, a city of 1.7 million people, had almost double our number of housing starts per capita from January to June this year.
I strongly believe that older generations care about people my age. You raised us, loved us, sent us to school and have high hopes for us. I see this in the twinkle in your eye when you talk about your children and grandchildren. My hope is that we can partner together to build a city in which everyone can afford to live side-by-side. This is not a zero-sum game, nor a binary choice between detached homes and ugly monoliths. We can work together to fast-track townhouses, low-rises and multi-unit renovations. Protecting heritage buildings and parks is important, but turning parking lots or aging buildings into denser housing should be met with a reflexive “yes.”
In addition to saying “yes” to new homes in the Glebe, we need to support similar policies across the city. Together, we can greenlight affordability by building the “missing middle” homes. More middle-density housing will mean shared (and therefore lower) infrastructure costs, less homelessness, better public transit, a more sustainable city and an ability to welcome more newcomers and children. Will you give a young whippersnapper a hand up?
Christopher Babcock shares a house in the Glebe and hopes to be able to afford to buy a home here in the future.