Stuck in Condoland
In a city where space is at a premium, tiny condos are the new family
home. Learning to survive in 700 square feet
Toronto Life
By Philip Preville | Photography by Dave Gillespie
11 June 2014
Abridged
Shannon Bury and Paul
LeBrun reorganized their condo around their son,
Jacob, and often use the building’s hallways as a play space
Shannon Bury was 27, with a marketing job in the 905 and her own condo
in Burlington, when the big city came to fetch her. The company she
worked for was acquired by a larger firm, Pareto Marketing, which moved
her job to Toronto. She moved along with it and traded up, selling her
place in Burlington and buying a 607-square-foot, one-bedroom-plus-den
unit in Charlie, a 36-storey tower proposed for Charlotte Street near
King and Spadina. She got the unit pre-construction for less than
$300,000, which was a steal, because really she’d purchased much more
than space: she bought the dream Toronto and its developers have been
selling throughout this decade-long boom. She was single in the city,
blonde and svelte, with a well-paying career-track job and, soon, a
condo on the edge of clubland. Toronto would be at her feet and at her
service. It was the spring of 2008.
Then she met a guy, Paul LeBrun. They got married in
the summer of 2012, and when they moved into Charlie that November,
they were already planning their family.
Jacob, now 10 months old, is busy teaching his parents the true meaning
of square footage. To make room for all the baby equipment, Shannon and
Paul relegated to storage an armchair, an end table, a coffee table
and, most recently, a loveseat. A lone couch remains from their brief
childless-couple condo life. “Our time is spent in play dates, and play
dates are spent with everyone sitting on the floor anyway,” Shannon
says.
Jacob’s playtime inevitably spills out into the hallway. The
neighbours don’t complain, and neither does Shannon when, for instance,
her 20-something party-boy neighbour has friends over for pre-drinks on
the balcony before heading out clubbing. “I can’t hold it against him,”
she says. “I’d be doing the same thing in his position. I’m jealous,
really.”
Everything that happened to Shannon and Paul in the last few years is
also happening to the city itself, shaped by forces greater than any of
them. Toronto has been swept up in a maelstrom of human and economic
migration that has swelled its population in the core. Shannon and Paul
bought into the New Toronto brand: the vertical city of luxury living,
cultural experience, Momofuku food and trendy boutiques. That’s how the
lifestyle is marketed by politicians and developers alike, and it’s
incredibly appealing to young adults in all their forms: staid
professionals, graduating millennials, hipsters.
Downtown Toronto is being reshaped by the latest baby boom. The total
number of preschool-age kids is rising fastest where condo towers are
going up, and nowhere is the demographic shift happening more intensely
than in the crane-addled area south of Queen from University to
Dufferin; there, the number of kids under age five has increased since
2006 by a whopping 65 per cent. Toronto is bearing witness to the birth
of a new generational phenomenon: the Condo Kid.
And the city is welcoming its Condo Kids, in essence, by putting their
cribs in the alcove nursery that condo marketers call a “den.” The real
estate tracking firm Urbanation says that, as of last March, there are
more than 25,000 condo units under construction in the former City of
Toronto, and few of them will have more than two bedrooms. Only 21 of
the 50 projects in pre-construction will have three-bedroom units. Even
the units with two bedrooms are getting smaller: the average size of a
condo in the GTA has dropped precipitously since 2009, from well over
900 square feet to 797 square feet today. Singles in the city are
coupling up, having kids and looking for bigger homes, yet developers
continue to flood the landscape with ever-tinier units—a situation
abetted by a lack of planning and enabled by politicians. A quiet
revolution is underway in how Toronto raises kids, one that was
perfectly predictable but for which the city has failed to prepare. A
whole generation of families are finding themselves stuck in their
starter homes.
Baby booms make for good business. Throughout downtown, businesses that
once operated on the assumption that they were located in a no-kids
zone are now catering to the needs of parents. Many fitness clubs have
added mom-and-tot Pilates, aquacise and yoga sessions. At restaurants,
the first sitting of the night is often for families, complete with
paper placemats and cupfuls of broken crayons. Coffee joints now host
regular play dates. The stroller mafia, once confined to neighbourhood
avenues like the Danforth and Roncesvalles, is now marking turf along
King West and Front Street.
Shannon Bury co-founded her own informal mommies’ group. It started out
as just three or four women hosting weekly play dates in each other’s
condos, but word spread fast. Now 23 moms, all of whom are first-time
maternity-leavers and nine of whom live in Charlie, meet every
Wednesday afternoon in the tower’s seventh-floor party room. Normally
there would be a fee to book the space, but Shannon convinced the
property manager to waive it for them.
For Wendy Kam Marcy and her seven-month-old son, Caden, who live on
Charlie’s 29th floor, the mommy group has been a godsend. “All my
friends moved to Markham and Etobicoke when they had kids,” she says.
“It was a lonely pregnancy for me. I was glad to find a community in my
own building.”
The couple’s unit in Charlie is their third condo. This one is a
two-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,000-square-foot corner suite. Caden sleeps
through the screech of turning streetcars and the wail of
clubland-bound police sirens. So far he has had a minimal effect on
their lifestyle—the ultimate goal of most first-time parents. “We still
eat out several times a week, and I am always going to events and
taking in attractions with Caden,” Wendy says. The new Ripley’s
Aquarium is a favourite destination.
There are two ways to look at the demographic shift toward Condo Kids.
Seen through a utopian lens, they are the final developmental stage of
a new-urbanist way of life. Condos are a lifestyle choice: a preference
for small private spaces and shared public ones; for carless commuting,
walkability and public transit; for a life that produces a smaller
environmental footprint.
The arrival of Condo Kids is rewriting Toronto’s myth of the Good Life.
Toronto’s old tag lines—the City That Works, the City of
Neighbourhoods —have specific meaning for parents. They are code for
City of Families: clean streets, good schools, low crime, dependable
services, early bedtimes, backyards. Torontonians live in apartments
until they have kids, then they get a house. In purely practical terms,
the chasm between downtowners and suburbanites has always been
trifling: whether you own a semi-detached in the Annex or an Etobicoke
bungalow, you’ve still got a terra firma freehold with leaves to rake
and walkways (and usually driveways) to shovel. For upwardly mobile
aspirers in this city, the idea of small-space, yardless, high-rise
family living is new.
The skeptical realist lens, however, sees the Condo Kids phenomenon and
wonders whether Toronto’s Good Life is being overhauled by choice and
changing values or by constraint and necessity. It’s nice to think that
all those glass towers are populated by people with a shared vision of
how cities should be, but when hundreds of thousands all find
themselves making the same lifestyle decisions at the same time, it’s
typically because other choices aren’t as available, affordable or
convenient.
Condos are the only affordable option when the average detached Toronto
home costs $965,670. The reason prices have shot so high is because no
one is building new detached or semi-detached homes for the city’s
emerging glut of new families. For developers, the payoff of condo
construction far outstrips that of detached housing. The lack of supply
explains why every empty nester’s house—even a dilapidated gut-job reno
that reeks of cat pee—sparks a bidding war when it goes to market.
People are still climbing over one another to have that Good Life.
Detached and semi-detached homes were purpose-built for kids, or more
precisely for adults at the parenthood stage of their lives, and for
them the benefits of a lifestyle lived at grade are tangible: lots of
private space, including outdoor space, along with quieter streets and
less intense traffic. Toronto’s condo boom was not conceptualized
around the needs of parents and children, though it was an oversight by
city planners and politicians to imagine that so many singles could
live in such proximity and not start breeding.
You can still get more space for less money the further you travel from
the core, but you’ll pay for it with the time you’ll spend in traffic,
a soul-numbing commute that will eat hours out of your week and steal
your time from your family. Toronto is choking on its own success. It’s
a good thing young parents like high-rise downtown living, because
there’s no way out.
The Marcys’ condo feels big, which is due in large part to the
window-walls, which make any space feel expansive, but also to the
choices they’ve made: white walls and sparse furnishings. When I
visited in March, the headquarters of Adfluent Media, then located in
their master bedroom, was being downsized to a small desk adjacent to
the kitchen so that Caden could take over the biggest room in their
home. “It makes sense for the flow of the space, since the master
bedroom is adjacent to the kitchen and common area,” Wendy says. “And
Caden needs it for his stuff.” It’s not the kind of trade-off that’ll
cramp their style: they were already sleeping in the second bedroom,
and Geoff is scoping out shared office space for Adfluent, which was
always part of the plan.
Another condo couple, Melissa Mahoney and Greg Corcoran, made the same
decision with their two-bedroom, third-floor condo in Corktown, handing
over the master bedroom to their daughter, Isabelle, now three years
old. Like many two-bed, two-bath condos, their second bathroom only has
a shower. The kid is the one who uses the tub, so the kid gets the
ensuite.
Condo parents are full of small-space tips. Don’t get a Jolly
Jumper—many condos lack a suitable door frame, and the downstairs
neighbours will complain. If baby doesn’t take to a toy right away,
give it to Goodwill. And avoid giant, moulded-plastic contraptions like
an ExerSaucer. Every condo family I met uses the Uppababy Vista
stroller—a $1,200 unit complete with bassinet—because it easily folds
for storage.
“I didn’t realize how little I needed,” says Melissa, a schoolteacher
whose daily commute takes her to Whitby. “We survived just fine without
many things other families have.” Greg, a communications manager at
Scotiabank and a truly liberated condo dad, sums it up succinctly using
the latest lifestyle mantra: “We’ve traded stuff for experience. I
don’t own a collection of power tools,” Greg says.
“I don’t need them. We pay our condo fees and the work gets done for
us.” In lieu of solitary Saturday trips to Canadian Tire, Greg spends
the time with Melissa and Isabelle at whatever kid-friendly event is
happening in the city.
Nearly all the condo couples I spoke to say they love the lifestyle
even with kids, but they all admit more space would be better and
wonder where to find it. Melissa and Greg are thinking of growing their
family, and they’re not sure yet what it means for their living
quarters. “Greg and I would stay in a condo if we could find the right
one,” Melissa says. “But there are no three-bedroom condos in this
city.”
Condo developers generally boost their profits by selling smaller units
and more of them. There’s also a tax incentive: provincial and
municipal land-transfer tax rates are higher for units valued at more
than $400,000, so that price has become a kind of magic number for
developers and buyers alike: $399,900 is a de facto maximum price
point, discouraging the construction of larger units that would cost
more. The dependency on pre-construction sales also skews the market.
Developers minimize their risk by selling as many units as they can
before they ever put a shovel in the ground—70 to 80 per cent of units
must be sold before a lender will provide construction financing.
Smaller units sell fast on launch weekend to eager young first-timers.
But buyers of larger condos generally prefer to see the unit before
they buy it, which means developers must carry the cost and the risk of
those unsold units until construction is complete, sometimes years
later.
There have been efforts to address the shortage of three-bedroom
condos, most notably by former Trinity-Spadina councillor Adam Vaughan,
who persuaded developers to build more than 1,500 new three-bedroom
units since he took office. But they can still be hard to find, in
Trinity-Spadina and elsewhere downtown. Charlie has 267 units and zero
three-bedrooms. Likewise, Urban Capital’s River City Phase 2 in the
West Don Lands has no three-bedrooms among its 248 units. Great Gulf’s
Yonge and Rich development reaches 50 storeys high but has no units
larger than two bedrooms plus den. Other developers are doing what
their industry is increasingly notorious for: the squeeze. At Bazis’ 1
Yorkville condo tower, you can get three bedrooms and two bathrooms for
$582,000—which seems reasonable until you realize it’s all shoehorned
into a paltry 797 square feet.
That sardine-tin unit aside, the prices for most three-bedroom condos
make a giant leap across the affordability gap. Down at Ten York,
another Tridel development, the cheapest three-bedroom unit, in a more
reasonably-sized 1,305 square feet, is listed for $935,000, plus
monthly property taxes and maintenance fees totalling nearly $1,200 per
month. The prices for three-bedroom condos are essentially on par with
those for ground-level homes, if not higher. In the search for private
space, the real competition for a three-bedroom condo is a classic
Toronto neighbourhood semi. It will take a much more substantial
increase in the supply of three-bedroom condos to stabilize prices.
Since that’s not about to happen anytime soon, the two-bedroom-plus-den
is proffered as the new affordable family home. Architects have
designed some clever layouts to separate the den from the living space
so that it can serve as a nursery or a toddler’s room. Even so, this
represents a sea change in the affordability promise of new housing.
It’s one thing when the price of a 1,400-square-foot semi-detached home
goes up: the same amount of space costs more. With pre-construction
condos, in every new tower that goes up, prices are rising while space
is shrinking. You no longer get the same for more; you get less for
more. Toronto is presiding over a gradual, deliberate shrinking of its
standard of living.
It’s early evening on a sunny summer day. You’ve got 35 minutes to
spare before supper and an energetic four-year-old to entertain. What
do you do?
This is the scenario Sybil Wa describes for me to illustrate the
difference between horizontal and vertical living with kids. It’s a
dilemma she knows first-hand from both her work and her life: she is an
architect with Diamond and Schmitt who lives in a condo in the
Entertainment District with her husband, Adam Parkin, a financial
analyst, and three kids, ages four, eight and 12. While downtown living
scores high on walkability to things like transit, restaurants,
workplaces and dry cleaners, it fails the proximity test for child’s
play. “When you live in a traditional home you have a backyard, a front
yard, a neighbour’s yard and maybe a park down the street,” she
observes. “You have lots of options within less than five minutes.”
Downtown has many capital-D Destinations for families—Toronto Island,
Canoe Landing, the ROM—but they all require a significant time
commitment just to get there. Meanwhile, in some parts of the condo
jungle, there’s nowhere to take kids on the block they live on. “What
we need is lots of small, kid-friendly spaces where there’s residential
growth,” she says, from condo rooftops to plazas to parkettes. In their
absence, kids and parents will create play spaces out of built forms
intended for other things. In Wa’s search for a safe place for her kids
to play on their scooters, she realized the top level of her building’s
parking garage was empty during the day. She now takes her kids up
there to ride around while she stands sentry for oncoming cars. Wa
calls it “guerilla parenting.” She also lets the kids burn energy in
the PATH system and on the fenced-in lawn of Osgoode Hall.
As private living quarters shrink, the use of public amenities, from
parks to libraries to community centres, increases and intensifies. The
Toronto Public Library has noticed the change: whereas typical visitors
used to spend 20 minutes picking out a book to take home, they now
settle in with their kids and laptops for stays of an hour or more. The
library has been able to adjust by reconfiguring its spaces, expanding
children’s areas and installing more desks with nearby electrical
outlets for recharging. But parks are a different story: there’s not
enough of them, and the city lacks both money and space to build new
ones. Parks that do exist are under intense population pressure. Berczy
Park, just west of the Gooderham Building on Front Street, was intended
as a place for nearby workers to get some sun over lunch hour. It’s now
surrounded by condo towers with more than 4,000 units.
It kind of defeats the purpose of stepping out for some fresh air if
you merely end up fighting for elbow room outside. Liberty Village
Park, that neighbourhood’s tiny central green space, is also surrounded
by thousands of condo dwellers, many of them dog owners who flood the
park after work. “This past winter was the worst,” says Gregor
Davidson, who lives in a Liberty condo with his wife, Adriana Girardi,
and their two-year-old son, Max. “There were land mines”—dog
droppings—“everywhere, hidden by the snowfalls.” The problem was raised
with the local city councillor, Mike Layton, to no discernible
improvement. Davidson and Girardi are committed condo-lovers, but they
are now planning a move to a new condo or townhouse just north of
Liberty Village, in a quieter neighbourhood.
Park spaces aren’t the only ones in short supply. The lack of daycare
spaces is a chronic problem everywhere in Toronto, but the steep cost
of downtown real estate contributes to exorbitant daycare costs while
also acting as a barrier to the creation of new spaces. At the Downtown
Kids Academy, situated among the new condos of King West, the number of
kids on the year-long wait-list grew in the past year by 30 per cent.
Rather than spend $1,800 per month to put Isabelle in a local daycare,
Melissa and Greg opted for a daycare near her job in Whitby—where
childcare costs a thrillingly affordable $1,000 per month.
Daycares are merely the canary in the coal mine for the next stage of
kids’ lives: schools. Ogden Junior Public School, near Queen and
Spadina, was threatened with closure 10 years ago. Today, it’s nearly
full, and enrolment is growing so fast that it will surpass 140 per
cent within the next four years. Last October, the Toronto District
School Board gerrymandered its catchment areas to redirect Ogden’s
overflow—essentially all the kids at CityPlace—to Ryerson Community
School. That will have to suffice until the TDSB builds a new school on
the railway lands, south of the tracks at Bathurst. That school is
expected to be fully subscribed from the day it opens in September
2018, as is the Catholic school slated to be built next door.
As the Condo Kids get older, there will be another wave of
infrastructure needs: soccer pitches, basketball courts, ice rinks and
swimming pools. It’s unclear how many facilities the city will require,
how they will get built, or who’ll operate them. Garrison Point, a new
Diamondcorp development just east of Liberty Village, includes a
spacious new park linked by footbridge to Fort York. The developer has
offered to build an outdoor pool on part of the site, but city hall is
leery of committing the annual funds needed to operate it.
Toronto can no longer afford to put off such decisions. The city has
reached a moment when no conversation about urban development should
proceed without putting the needs of children and parents at the
forefront.
Natasha Persaud and Jeremy Swampillai are at a crossroads. They
got married in 2004 and bought a two-bed, two-bath, 1,000-square foot
condo at The Element, a Tridel development just outside CityPlace at
Front and Blue Jays Way. They bought it pre-construction, along with
parking, for $350,000 and took possession in 2007. It’s a great
building full of local celebrities, notably professional athletes. He
and Natasha love to entertain, and
one of the highlights of their social calendar is their Christmas
appetizer party, where friends bring both food and drink, and talk into
the night.
Last September, they joined the Condo Kid phenomenon, welcoming their
son, Xavier, into their world. Xavier was the star of their Christmas
party last year at barely eight weeks. He went to Momofuku Noodle Bar
for dinner at 10 p.m. and was an angel. He went to the Trump for drinks
and hated it. He enjoyed Crocodile Rock on Adelaide, though he got a
few strange looks. Some parents could not stomach taking their infants
on any of these outings. Natasha surprised even herself. “Jeremy wanted
kids more,” she says. “I thought I was going to be a nervous mom.”
Natasha and Jeremy know they’re headed for a reckoning once Xavier
learns to walk. “Our place is very adult-centric right now,” Jeremy
says. “There’s lots of technology in our home, wires everywhere. We’ve
got two laptops floating around. We’ve got a full bar. There’s a lot we
need to address.” The plan is to address it with a new home. They just
don’t agree on what that home should be. Jeremy thinks a ground-level
house outside downtown would be best, and he’s open to going well
outside city limits.
Natasha is more conflicted about it. Her first reaction reflects the
Old Toronto ideal. “I think a home with a yard would be best. A
neighbourhood with kids across the street, playing in the park.” Then,
gently, almost without realizing it, she dismantles that ideal piece by
piece. “Jeremy’s work takes him to different places downtown on
different days,” she says. “He doesn’t have a regular commute. I’ve
been at SickKids for 14 years, and I like working there. It’s a
20-minute walk from here. I am not interested in commuting on the GO
train and transferring to the TTC.” Distance commuting, whether by car
or by rail, makes people feel like cattle. Walking to work is a tonic.
Then she talks about the other moms she’s met. Natasha’s first four
months of maternity leave coincided with a brutal winter that kept her
cloistered inside. Now she’s got a full schedule of classes and
drop-ins and play dates, which have broadened her social circle. She
made two new friends at swim class and another at fitness class, who’ve
in turn introduced her to others. “A lot of the girls live in
CityPlace, which is just around the corner,” she says. The moms there
have banded together to turn a coffee shop’s patio into an unofficial
playground. “There’s lots of moms my age.” Natasha clearly believes
she’s found her peer group of moms, not merely in terms of age but in
terms of lifestyle. The next words out of her mouth are: “If we move to
the suburbs, it won’t be the same.”
Natasha has hit upon a crucial truth, which is that human friendships
can enrich any landscape and even transform it. Her peers are downtown,
they’re likely staying, and it hardly matters whether they’re staying
because they love condo living or because they can’t find an affordable
home with a yard—they’ve begun to form a community. The condo towers
weren’t built with families in mind, but they’re being repurposed on
the fly by sheer force of numbers, the new rules of happiness being
made up as they grow.
Comments
pieinthesky Clayshapes Pottery • 2 months ago
Not just families, for all demographics. You also will see nobody but
young people in the condos, a retiree would feel like an idiot. That
never happens in Europe or even Manhattan where all age groups live
cheek by jowl.
Shandy • 3 months ago
Some of these families simply strike me as young first time parents.
You can spend a year or two pretending that your life hasn't changed
(going to bars, throwing your drunken Christmas party) and then it
starts to wear off and you realize it has changed. In some ways it is
easiest to pretend with a newborn who will sleep through dinner at a
restaurant. Your two year old won't, and likely the surrounding tables
won't find them cute unless it is a family restaurant.
Many of these parents will realize that they are no longer enjoying
many of the benefits of central urban living (other than a short
commute). You aren't out wining and dining because you either can no
longer afford it, find the time, don't stay up late anymore, are
getting old, etc. Having children = deep personal sacrifice on all
sorts of levels, and many of these young families haven't realized it
or are still trying to resist it. They will wake up one day and realize
they are keeping their kids in a constrained environment so that THEY
(the parents) can try to maintain their cosmopolitan lifestyle.
Sophie • 3 months ago
“She also lets the kids burn energy in the PATH system”…”The moms there
have banded together to turn a coffee shop’s patio into an unofficial
playground”.
I get that Toronto is in major need of kid-friendly places, but can you
please stop turning these beautiful commercial spaces into your
personal playground? It’s one thing if you are walking through the PATH
with your kids, but actually bringing them there to run around like it
is a gymnasium is incredibly distressing to the other pedestrians. It
is also teaching your kids that their needs are more important than
others’. Same thing with the coffee shop. If you want to take your kids
for hot chocolate that’s wonderful, but please, please don’t make the
Starbucks patio your playgroup destination, unless you plan on spending
twice as much to make up for the loss in revenue.
Jolene C • 3 months ago
Assuming this entire article wasn't invented out of whole cloth on
orders from BILD, the featured millennial's shallow urban boosterism
and self-delusion explains a lot about what happened on election day.
You think merely inventing a catch phrase "Condo Kids" is going to
somehow inoculate them from impending psychosis of their veal-like
conditions? Put a little extra in your TFSAs each month for psych
counseling and Zanax, you adorable hipsters. They're gonna need it.
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