Morgan Sharp, Indigenous Journalism Initiative Reporter, Canada’s National Observer – July 31, 2022 / 10:20 am | History: 378050
Photo: David Klein
Actor David Klein has been paying as much as a typical Toronto rent on his student debt since moving back in with his parents.
The pandemic upended David Klein’s burgeoning acting career in New York, but the 26-year-old was lucky to be able to return to the comfort of his childhood home in downtown Toronto.
Still, with the price of almost everything on a sharp upward trajectory and exchange and interest rates working against him, Klein doesn’t expect to return to a more independent life for several years.
“I don’t have the income right now to support both the massive student debt payments and the rent, which is going up a lot,” said Klein, a dual citizen who borrowed nearly $100,000 to attend New York University. year-long drama school program and was preparing for her first off-Broadway play when the pandemic hit in 2020.
Long-standing high housing costs in Toronto this year have been accompanied by broader inflation, with prices for food, fuel, transportation and a range of other essential and discretionary goods pushed up by pandemic-related supply chain disruptions and worker shortages.
Younger people feel disadvantaged more than older people because of differences in their spending habits, according to Toronto-Dominion Bank, which in March took a closer look at the demographic breakdown of pricing in the United States.
“The cost of clothing, the cost of grooming, a lot of grooming and styling products, it’s definitely gone up,” Klein said. “For someone who’s trying to maintain my looks, I’m more careful about that element.”
Central banks, including the Bank of Canada and the U.S. Federal Reserve, have suddenly raised interest rates to try to tame price spikes, but that has also hurt people like Klein and thousands of other college graduates trying to pay off debt.
Klein has so far managed to pay off about half of his US dollar-denominated debt since returning to Canada, but the interest rate he pays on it recently rose to 5.5 percent after previously dropping to 3.1 the percentage.
Meanwhile, his restaurant wages haven’t increased nearly as fast as everything else, and the weaker Canadian dollar against the greenback is adding to the crisis.
“I feel less free in a way,” Klein said. “A lot of the cheap ways to live and get around in your 20s don’t really exist in the same way.”
Consumer inflation rose to 8.1 percent year-over-year in June, Statistics Canada said, its biggest annual change since 1983. The acceleration from a 7.7 percent increase in May was mostly due to higher gas prices, although seven of eight major components rose by at least three percent. Excluding gasoline, the consumer price index rose 6.5 percent year-on-year in June, following a 6.3 percent increase in May.
Rent relief in Montreal
Spencer Hunt wasn’t exactly forced out of Toronto by the high cost of living, but he and his girlfriend will get a lot more bang for their buck when they move to Montreal next month after she was accepted as a master’s student at McGill University.
After working from home twice became too much for their $1,450-a-month one-bedroom basement apartment in Bloordale, the couple moved to a nearby two-bedroom apartment in early 2021 that cost $1,880 a month.
Hunt can continue doing his job providing technical support for medical imaging software in Montreal, where the two have found a larger space for less than $1,800 in the Plateau-Mont Royal neighborhood.
“The apartment is bigger than this one; there’s also two bedrooms, but there’s a living room—we don’t have one here—in a nicer place, relatively closer to downtown than where we live now,” he said.
Hunt does most of the grocery shopping and has noticed the spike in prices, and also says it’s harder to justify going out to socialize with friends these days.
“It’s kind of hard because after the pandemic, you want to go to restaurants, get takeout, see people and hang out again, and it all adds up,” he said.
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