
Why I’m not selling my house
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A couple weeks ago, a man in his mid-40s showed up at my door.
He was a bit of a bit, a bit nervous.
“My name’s Matt, I’ve been working here for seven years,” he said.
“I’m doing this because I’m tired of the city not supporting the people here.”
He had just bought a house, a couple of years ago.
He had been living in a condo in the city for nearly 10 years, and was about to get a new one, too.
The man was worried about the city’s housing situation.
He said he’d been paying taxes for decades.
Matt didn’t need to be told that, he was already aware of the issues facing people who live in Toronto, he said, and the city doesn’t need him.
The Toronto housing market is a “choke point,” he told me.
He told me that he’s never lived anywhere else in Canada, but he’d be willing to travel to other cities to buy a place if it meant getting a new condo.
Matt is not a big fan of the condo market, but in the past year, the number of people who are willing to live in condos has been growing.
He’s not the only one, either.
Since mid-2017, about 2,400 people have moved into the condo rental market, an increase of about 100 per cent.
That’s a lot of people, but it’s not a lot, said Matt.
Most of them are young, middle-aged, and older.
About half of them bought a condo to rent out.
Matt said that he wasn’t buying his house to make a quick buck, he wanted to stay in the country for a while.
“It’s my choice,” he says.
Matt has been in Canada for about two decades, and he was living in the U.K. for nearly a decade.
He moved to Toronto because he was interested in a different lifestyle, and had a lot to gain by working at the condo.
He could see that the city was moving forward on some policies, but his concerns about housing were a little more specific.
I was the guy who was supposed to do a good job on the tax system, but then it didn’t happen, he says, adding that he was concerned about the impact of the new tax regime.
He didn’t see the benefits, he felt.
“This city is so broken, and I want to change that,” he tells me.
I’m surprised he didn’t buy a condo.
“You know what I think?” he said to me.
“The city doesn and will not help.”
Matt has lived in Toronto for 20 years, has a wife and two kids, and is now moving out.
“For someone to say, ‘I’m going to move to New York,’ I think that would be a bit hypocritical,” he explains.
He says he was a “lazy person” for not buying a condo before.
He also felt that the way things were going, he wasn.
“But, honestly, I didn’t have the money to buy that house, so I was going to do something else.”
Matt bought his first home in 2010, and now lives in a three-bedroom house in the Queen Elizabeth area of Toronto, a neighbourhood that has seen a significant increase in the number and density of condos.
He owns a condo, and spends about $40,000 a year on rent and other expenses.
“What I’ve learned in the last decade is that you need to keep moving forward,” he adds.
“And I was doing that.”
A lot of the time, he tells people, when he’s working, he’s not going to be around much.
The only people he wants to see are his family.
“There’s nothing I miss, it’s just too hard to come here,” he complains.
He thinks the condo boom in Toronto is a bubble that will burst.
“People want to live like the big cats in the Catskills, they don’t want to do it on the low end of the market,” he claims.
In other words, he’d rather live in a city where the market is more stable and people aren’t living like the rich, which is what he does.
In the past few years, condos have been the biggest growth driver in Toronto.
They’re currently up over 400 per cent, and Matt thinks that they’ll hit 4,000 by 2021.
“Toronto is a city of dreams,” he wrote in a blog post.
“Its not for everyone, but its a city that loves its residents.
The next decade is going to see a massive shift in the face of the housing crisis.”
Matt says he doesn’t think Toronto will be a better place for a lot longer, he believes it will be one of the worst cities in Canada.
“With more condos, you can see that it’s a more stable, more stable place,” he writes.
Matt says that he has heard a lot about the condo