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I Bought a House and Became Part of the Problem

Homeownership is now a retirement plan, pension substitute, nest egg. And that’s exactly what’s broken

SOCIETY / JULY/AUGUST 2026

I Bought a House and Became Part of the Problem

Homeownership is now a retirement plan, pension substitute, nest egg. And that’s exactly what’s broken

ILLUSTRATION BY ROMAIN LASSER

Published 6:30, APRIL 13, 2026

I never expected to own a home. I wasn’t born into generational wealth. I grew up poor. There was—and is—no big family inheritance coming my way. Not property. Not cash. Not stocks or bonds or whatever financial instrument one might trade or sell or leverage to join the landed class. I haven’t experienced the sort of professional success that makes property ownership possible. Years of education and advanced degrees, column inches in mainstream platforms, and occasional admittance into rooms filled with the high priests and priestesses of the upper crust pay the bills. They don’t secure a mortgage.

My eyes were fixed on simple goals. Live here or there or anywhere—not quite blowing with the wind but ready to pack up and leave when the building got too rundown or the owners decided it was time to “move back in” or “renovate.” I accepted my lot. “Every time I read some weekend column about a boomer struggling to retire on $100,000 a year and a multi-million-dollar home,” I wrote on (then) Twitter in 2019, “I’m reminded that my retirement plan is to die in the climate wars.” That joke often makes it back into the discourse through some byway. It holds up.

The tweet might also hold up for Canadians who followed the prescribed path for professional success—names you’ll never read in print or hear on the radio but who are coping with the resentment that comes with having committed no sin except being born into the wrong time. While roughly two-thirds of the country owned their own home as we neared the first quarter of this new century, the number varies by age. In Better Dwelling, a Vancouver-based news outlet focused on Canadian housing, Stephen Punwasi reports the homeownership rate for those aged twenty-five to forty-four—a category into which I currently fall—peaked four decades ago. Then, between 2011 and 2021, it fell by at least five points.

No surprise why. Since 2000, the cost of homeownership in Canada has risen 300 percent. In February of this year, the average selling price for a home in Canada was just over $663,000—and far higher in Toronto, at just over a million dollars, and Vancouver, at $1.25 million. Average wages from 1998 to 2021 haven’t gone up nearly as much. According to Statistics Canada, the average wage has increased just 23 percent. That’s less than a tenth of the growth in the cost of buying a home.

The myth that hard work and prudent saving will land you a house may be fully in retreat. You can’t always work hard enough to make the math work. Even when the housing market cools, it’s expected to come roaring back soon enough. No, the myth is indeed a fable. If you want to own a home, you have to win the lottery. And I did.

Despite decades of struggle and resignation, I hit the jackpot by falling in love. We moved in together. Or, more precisely, I moved in with her. She had been able to secure a home because of a confluence of favourable circumstances, including a good job, hard work, getting into the market at the right time, and help from family. I became the beneficiary of that. Twice over, really, since later we bought a home together.

Signing mortgage documents alongside her brought a sense of accomplishment. I was a kid who escaped the orbit of his family’s less-than-modest means and joined the landed gentry. I also felt guilt. I was thinning out supply, bidding up values, and scoring some stability, while others, priced out of the market, were left to military-crawl into the latter half of their life. Even with a home and a new job as a book editor, I doubt I’ll ever retire. But beggars and choosers and all that.

Buying a house is not only something people do but something they are told they ought to do. With that dream in place, you start to think you’re missing the train if you don’t hop on board. You’re promised that wherever it’s going, it’s good. That sense of momentum comes easier for some. There is a generational dynamic to the related challenges of housing affordability, investment, and retirement. But at their core, they’re as much a class problem as anything. You’re either in the right class or you’re not. And if not, it’s the lottery or bust.

Our house is, first and foremost, where we live. It’s where I salt the front walkway and........

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