The bank said this single mother couldn’t afford her Toronto condo. She now pays nearly double in rent

Though Wheedon, a screenwriter and novelist in her 50s, says she never missed a mortgage payment, she lost the Little Italy condo in 2021 when she had to reapply for her mortgage. She says she didn’t make enough to qualify — and now, she and her daughter share a smaller rental for nearly double the monthly cost.

“I was so proud of myself that I bought my condo,” she said. “I felt a huge piece of my identity leave with no longer being a mortgage holder and turning into a renter.”

Although home ownership is seen as an on-ramp to stability and property ownership, Wheedon is reckoning with the reality that while she once dreamed of working her way up to the detached home of her dreams, she may never afford to own her own home again. Renters face steeper barriers than homeowners to building their savings — and for those who can no longer afford their homes, it’s a difficult path back to regain that equity once it’s lost.

Wheedon says her mortgage broker advised her in 2015 to put an additional person on her application “as security” to ensure she would qualify for her mortgage, as her income as a worker in the arts can fluctuate. So she and her boyfriend — like a growing number of Canadians who have gotten creative on the path to home ownership — agreed to sign him on for 1 per cent of the mortgage, with the understanding that he would never pay for it. 

After they had broken up, her former partner wanted to buy property of his own — and to do so, he wanted off her mortgage. Wheedon had to reapply on her own, and this time she didn’t qualify.

“The writing was on the wall: there was no way I (would pass) as a film worker, as a single woman, with rising interest rates and the vice of stress testing,” she said.

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• Dec 31, 1969
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• Dec 31, 1969
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She sold the condo and was able to move into a 1,300-square-foot two-bedroom in her daughter’s school district — allowing her more space and a backyard garden, but the rent nearly doubled her monthly housing expenses. Then, this past fall, she got a call that made the ground crumble beneath her once more: her landlord was selling her building to someone who intended to live there, sending her and her daughter scrambling once more for a home.

When Wheedon lived in her condo, which was about 700 to 800 square feet, she spent about $2,000 on her mortgage and condo fees. Her current rent is nearly $4,000 for a 600-square-foot two-bedroom apartment in a bungalow converted into two units, where she says the sound and smells of her neighbours through the partition wall are inescapable. Still, the Leaside unit allowed for her daughter to stay in the same school district.

“It’s making me more poor when if I was in the place I’d been in the first place, I’d be in a great position,” she said. “Now all of my money is going toward rent, which theoretically should be going toward a new house for me to buy.”

Carrie Freestone, an economist for RBC, said that Wheedon is not alone in facing significant challenges to building wealth as a renter. In a recent study Freestone authored, she found that in 1999, homeowners and renters both devoted a fourth of their income to housing on average — but in 2022, renters paid a third of their income to housing expenses while homeowners had dropped to paying closer to a fifth.

“Renters are in a more challenging position to accumulate wealth than homeowners,” she said. “If housing becomes more of a story of wealth transfers and less of a story of people working hard to to buy a home, then we could reasonably expect to see more inequality in Canada.”

She added that renters like Wheedon are also not able to build equity, which could be passed on to their children or used for retirement. Real estate is the primary driver of wealth in Canada, said Freestone, but only a third of Canadians can afford to buy a home based solely on their income.

It’s been a trying few months for Wheedon, who was faced with the death of her mother, the deadline for her latest book, and the move-out date from her former apartment within days of each other. It was a reminder of the growing distance between where she’s at now and her dreams of home ownership. She feels she has done everything right — never missing a rent payment, keeping her credit score high — but says she has been “punished” by the current system, which she feels has failed to look out for her first as a homeowner and now as a renter. 

“I always thought I would move out of a condo and one day be able to be in a house,” Wheedon said. “When I hear (millennial) and Gen Z people saying, ‘I’m never going to own a house,’ I’m like, yeah well, me too.”