Not a Regular Landlord. A Cool Landlord.
My mantra for this next stage of life 🔑
Happy Thanksgiving! I have lots to be grateful for this year, but my readers are always top of the list.
Thank you for subscribing, reading my silly little posts, and encouraging me to keep writing. You da best.
We did it. After eight months of work, our home renovations are finally done. Everything is covered in sawdust, the walls are empty, and there are still So. Many. Things. To. Do.
Last weekend, Mark and I sat on our old couch in the newly-finished basement and looked around. The space had transformed from a dirt hole into a glossy one-bedroom apartment.
“I would be proud to live here,” Mark said.
“It’s nicer than most of the places we’ve lived” I agreed.
We speculated about who might reply to our listing. It had been pending approval on Facebook and the anticipation was making us second-guess everything.
Any day now the universe will realize that we don’t deserve this house. Our real estate agent should be calling any second to confirm that this was all a big joke. You’ve been punk’d! You stupid idiots! This could never be yours!
Surely any potential tenant would see that we have no business being landlords.
The imposter syndrome comes after years of yearning for a house. I catch myself looking around in disbelief, forgetting that we’ve both been working towards this since before we met.
I’m quick to dismiss years of living in much sketchier basement apartments. I’ve willfully blotted out all the mortgage applications and job changes and penny-pinching and freakouts and extra schooling and side jobs and volunteering and burnout and layoffs and breakdowns to get here: semi-comfortable with an unfathomable amount of debt.
A number that will only start to go down if we rent this unit.
“Someone will really love it,” Mark said, and I tried to imagine seeing the space for the first time. It’s small but laid out well. It’s clean and bright. It looks new.
It’s a lot like my first apartment in Toronto. Also a basement. Also an East-end home. That place is where I fell in love with the city.
It would be pretty cool to give that to someone else.
Facebook was a lot less optimistic.
The moment our post went live, we were bombarded with hate messages.
Commenters were quick to call us disgusting. Greedy. Exploitative. Inhumane. Everything that’s wrong with housing in Toronto. The source of all evil. Typical landlords. Just the WORST.
Their vitriol drove right into the heart of our insecurities. We don’t deserve this, and we’re terrible. Of course! I should have seen it before!
People famously hate landlords. They are easy villains, always bugging the down-on-his-luck hero for rent.
It’s a shocking moment to catch yourself empathizing with the story's bad guys. One second you see yourself as the main character, the next you’re agreeing with the parents of the children's movie: No, you can’t swim out into the open sea. No, you shouldn’t marry someone you just met. What do you mean you’re going to the elephant graveyard? I explicitly said not to go there. So many other places are available to you, you little shit!
And so, as the comments kept rolling in, I began to question - have we become awful?
Because it wasn’t just one person who told us we sucked. It was all different types of tenants:
Frustrated renters told us the price was ridiculous
Mental health advocates claimed basements are cruel
Sticklers pointed out that our furnishing wasn’t good enough to charge more rent
Conspiracy theorists posited that we were part of “Mr. DOUGGY FORD’S LIES”.
Activists told us we were too privileged to be fair
Many people insinuated that we’re out of touch because clearly, no one who has ever had to rent before would be so unreasonable.
“Working-class folks who happen to become landlords are probably the most likely to price fairly too, considering they know and maybe at one point were renters themselves ”
I couldn’t tell what was the most shocking part of that comment. The claim that we’d never rented before, or the assertion that anyone could just happen to become a landlord.
Sure, Mark and I have privilege. We are white and straight with secure jobs and solid educations. We also both come from single-parent homes. We didn’t grow up with a ton of cash or an understanding of wealth. We didn’t take money from our families to buy our house.
Of the eleven homes I’ve lived in, four have been basements. I was a renter in three. The fourth was the house I grew up in.
There was a time - not so long ago - when property felt out of the cards for me. I used my oven to stay warm and ate plain rice out of my one-and-only pot. I stole food from my cafe job and refused to turn on any lights to limit electricity bills. I lived like a vole.
We (and our parents) are extremely proud of everything we’ve accomplished. In a different story, we are the Canadian Dream. Scrappy risk-takers who are making it work in the city they love.
On Facebook, we are monsters.
The more comments I read, the more I started to believe that we should be. Maybe we are the problem. Maybe we care too much about amassing wealth to ever be seen as “good.” Maybe by having any level of success, we are disqualified from being relatable or kind or even human.
Typical landlords.
For days, Mark could barely sleep.
We would oscillate between pride and shame about the apartment. We had long conversations about the spew of hate under the post. Did we think it was fair? Did we price too high? Should we take it down and stick to Craigslist?
Are we actually Disgusting? Greedy? Exploitative?
On Wednesday I took a walk to the BulkBarn hoping some chocolate-covered pretzels would ease my stress. I thought about how nice it would be to have a bit of extra income. Just enough so that I wouldn’t have to think twice about an impromptu candy run.
Is it so terrible to benefit from someone’s rent? It was the only option we had to stay in Toronto. I thought through other scenarios: We could have left the city (but we love it here). We could have bought a smaller place (but then we’d delay having a family even more). We could have kept renting (but why wouldn’t we want to own)?
Greedy. Greedy. Greedy.
The more I paced the candy aisles, the angrier I got.
We are not some rich land developers. We are not plotting to suck working-class people dry with an underground hovel. We put pride into the place. We spent everything we had making it liveable. Does that not count for anything?
It’s not like we want to have someone living in the basement. The price of keeping our dream home is sharing it with a stranger. We’ve opened ourselves up to scrutiny on the internet in the hopes of finding a normie to give us a bit of relief on our mortgage and debt payments and cost of living.
You know what, maybe that is greedy. Maybe it would be kinder to live in a suburb away from any renters. Maybe the most altruistic thing to do would be to give up.
And then what? Someone else buys our home and keeps the basement for themselves. Maybe then there are even fewer places to rent because there aren’t desperate people like us trying to get by. Less inventory means higher prices. SO THERE. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT INTERNET?! YOU’RE WELCOME WE OFFERED THE PLACE UP AT ALL!
I looked up and locked eyes with an old man carrying the largest bag of gummy bears I’d ever seen. He must have emptied the entire bin into that bag. It didn’t even close. He cradled it like a giant bag of flour in the crook of his elbow. Protective of his senior discount day haul.
He hoarded them fair and square.
I felt guilty all over again.
At dinner, Mark told me about more and more comments that had shown up.
“I did something bad,” he said. “I’ve been replying.”
Not just replying. Mark had made a Google doc breaking down every justification we had for the cost. He linked comparable units. He budgeted out the furnishing. He outlined every utility. He shared that, despite everyone’s assertions that we’d be getting rich off the rent, that fee doesn’t even cover our debt payments. It’s not even close to a third of our monthly expenses for this home - and we’re giving up a third of our space.
The commenters didn’t care. Of the thirty left on our post, these are the ones that sent me spiralling:
“It being comparably priced, when the standard is exploitative, is not a sensible justification”
If that’s not a sensible justification, then what is? To give it away for free? To take less than it’s worth?
What did they expect? We’d look at how everyone else in the market is pricing and say,
“Not us! We are too kind-hearted to enjoy money. In fact, we hate money. We want to have strangers live in our house for free. Because that’s the honourable, quaint, and totally normal thing to do. Please - come one come all and have access to our home. While you’re at it - do you want some of our equity? Of my savings? my firstborn!
You commented, and therefore you are entitled to whatever you want. Thems the rules!”
“It’s not the renter’s choice to pay into the furniture”
Oh, but it is! No one is forcing you to rent this place.
In fact, I would never rent it to any of you. I am the landlord! I say no! HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES?
“No one should pay this much unless they’re getting equity.”
After $300,000 of renovations, eight months of work, and over a decade of waiting, NO you cannot move in and start getting equity in OUR home. What do you even mean? Do you have a mortgage approval? Are you paying property taxes? Are you going to cover any maintenance?
If you want equity, then buy! Join a co-op! Move!
After each new comment, I feel myself getting more and more jaded. What is happening to me? Am I becoming conservative? Why are we carrying the weight of the entire housing crisis on our shoulders?
Is this how landlords become evil? One Facebook comment at a time.
The next day I prepared to show the apartment. I wore a loose floral dress, playing the part of the East-end wife. I wanted to look approachable and kind, but also old enough to be showing a unit.
I desperately wanted to prove the commenters wrong. I refused to be a slimy landlord, and, in so doing, offered things I probably shouldn’t have. I told the potential tenants that they could have some of our garden space, that we’d buy them a space heater, and that they could knock on our door whenever.
Because I’m not a regular landlord. I’m a cool landlord.
As we walked around, I remembered that I quite liked the unit. I did, after all, help design it.
“Have you lived in a basement before?” She asked me. I told her that I had. That I actually didn’t mind it. That we reconfigured the whole space to ensure you had the most light possible. That it’s cheaper than a condo and that was a huge advantage to me.
“I think this is perfect for us”, she said.
I could have cried.
Yesterday that tenant signed the lease. All in all, the posting was up for less than a week.
Before we marked the listing as “sold”, a handful of commenters had started becoming friends. They tagged each other and set times to get coffee in order to ”resource share”. We accidentally created a public sphere under our post where angry renters took refuge. A different type of housing that we didn’t intend to offer.
I want to say I feel bad for the people who were so offended by our post. I actually feel really smug.
I guess I’m officially an asshole landlord.
Questions for the comment section:
Are we terrible people?
Do all landlords suck?
Have you ever had an amazing landlord?
What’s an irrelevant conspiracy theory you’d love to debate under this post?
Seriously what was that guy doing with those gummy bears?
Congrats on all renovations being done yay!!!
The only terrible people are the Facebook commenters spewing outrageous shit. You and Mark have every right to rent out your basement unit at whatever price you want - considering you both did pay for it. Not all landlords are terrible, I've had my fair share of landlords and all were super sweet! My fiancé is a landlord and he likes to think he doesn't suck (which he definitely doesn't).
Is the moon real or is it just a hologram? And is the US being governed by alien lizard people?
Gummy bear man was probably making some boozy bears! Or storing up for winter...
You have worked hard for this. You deserve this and only good things! And you are sharing your space! Glad you connected with someone who appreciates that!