He can't afford to rent an apartment. So this man secretly sleeps in an office
CBC
A man in St. John's rents office space, but he doesn't have an office job.
He's an electrician, driving from gig to gig all day. The office is where he sleeps at night, secretly, because he couldn't afford to rent an apartment anywhere in the city. For two months during the frigid Newfoundland and Labrador winter, he lived in his truck. Then, in February, he found an office listed for $450 per month.
"I'm 100 per cent doing this clandestinely," the 37-year-old told CBC News. "I basically have given up on finding anything else."
CBC News agreed not to identify the man because it would jeopardize his precarious living situation and his employment. But he is one of many people across Canada who contacted CBC News about how the cost of rent has affected them and their living situations.
Many of those people, like him, have full-time jobs.
Finding housing at all is daunting amid surging prices and decreased availability marking Canada's rental housing crisis. Demand is outpacing supply across the country, with vacancy rates reaching a new low and average rent growth increases reaching a new high, notes a January rental market report from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC).
The average asking price for rent in Canada hit an all-time high of $2,202 per month in May, according to a June report from listing website Rentals.ca.
The website looked at rents for condos, apartments and houses/townhouses, based on monthly listings from the Rentals.ca Network of Internet Listings Services.
Its data covers both the primary and secondary rental markets and includes basement apartments, rental apartments, condominium apartments, townhouses, semi-detached houses and single-detached houses.
The situation where a full-time worker still can't find an affordable rental option is becoming more common, said Annie Hodgins, executive director of the Toronto-based non-profit Canadian Centre for Housing Rights.
Ten years ago, the Canadians who called the centre's rental help line were mostly lower income or on social assistance, Hodgins said. But these days, more calls are coming in from people who are employed full time, she said.
"It really reflects how astronomically high rental housing is," Hodgins told CBC News. "It's a huge problem."
A recent CBC News analysis of more than 1,000 neighbourhoods across Canada's largest cities found that fewer than one per cent of rentals are both vacant and affordable for the majority of the country's renters.
In October 2023, across the 35 metropolitan areas CBC News analyzed, only 1,400 bachelor or one-bedroom homes were vacant and located in neighbourhoods that full-time minimum-wage workers could afford. CBC calculated affordability based on rental costs and utilities staying below 30 per cent of households' gross income, a benchmark set by the CMHC in 1986.
It's small things, like a cigarette or a pair of clean socks, Rachel Montour says, that can go a long way to make you feel more human when you’re out on the street.
Several dozen members of Windsor's Chaldean community and its supporters celebrated in the cold at the corner of Marentette Avenue and Wyandotte Street East Friday, as city officials gave a secondary name to the section of Marentette between Wyandotte and Tuscarora Street: Chaldean Way.
Allison Hill says she tries to make people’s experience at the Thunder Bay Food Bank “as pleasant as possible.”
Two years after a man went missing in Scarborough, Toronto police are renewing the investigation in hopes that the public will bring forward more information.
A musical instrument created in Guelph, Ont., has been thrust onto the international stage — or rather, screen.
More than 1,000 Maritime Electric customers are without power after high winds blew across the Island Friday night into Saturday.
The Supreme Court of Canada is deliberating a case that could shape the way sentences are handed down in cases where both the offender and victim are Indigenous, which some Nunavut lawyers say could have ramifications for the Inuit-majority territory.
A man barricaded in a former church in Welland, Ont., was taken into custody early Saturday, nearly 24 hours into a standoff that began over a fence dispute.
Peel police are investigating after a Friday night shooting in Mississauga left one person dead, police said.
Another busy construction season has come to an end in London, and the city is already looking ahead to next spring when a slew of new projects are expected to begin.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has begun to lay out publicly what he sees as boundaries when dealing with China, as his government wades into a new relationship with the economic giant.
Ferry crossings are cancelled and over a thousand households are left without power Saturday morning, due to high winds and severe weather conditions.
Tens of thousands of Nova Scotia Power customers are waking up without power on Saturday morning after high winds and rain hit the province on Friday night.