When I moved to Yorkton in 2009 I lived in an apartment that cost $575 a month. Today, if someone wanted to live in the same apartment, they would be looking at paying $935 a month, going by the apartment management’s website. For that fee it appears that there has been little change to the apartment overall, though the air conditioner has been replaced and presumably doesn’t trip the breaker anymore.
At the time, finding a place to rent was not exactly easy, I chose that particular apartment because it was available and appeared structurally sound. Of those two key points, only one still holds true, since the building in question has no available suites. I won’t say my old apartment was necessarily bad, but it did have a shirtless man smoking on the front steps which isn’t something that would be highlighted by any real estate agent. As a place to live, it was totally functional shelter and definitely worth what I was paying for it. The fact that it’s now over $350 more is what gives me pause.
Still, if that place is getting dangerously close to the $1,000 a month threshold, it highlights what has become a very real issue in the city, that being rental housing. This has become the barrier for entry for people who intend to live here, you effectively need to know someone before you can actually move to the city. That was true five years ago, when I spent the first month living with some acquaintances as I searched for a place to live, and it’s true now. A large number of people I know who move to the city spend the first month living with someone who they know while they find a permanent residence. This is sensible in a way, because it gives you time to properly search property and find a place. On the other hand, it does mean that you’ve got to know people if you actually want to live here.
The solution is inevitably an issue of supply and demand. There’s plenty of demand, but the rental supply has always been short. What the city needs, more than anything, is a new apartment build. That need has become more acute during the past month, of course, but it’s actually not new at all, the city has needed an apartment build for the past several years. The issue is that it’s difficult to actually encourage apartments, especially those on the less expensive side of the equation. It’s not that profitable to develop a building full of units priced around $600 a month, especially since people are clearly charging much more than that all the time.
Part of the solution could be some new builds that are priced comparable to the older units currently on the market. Those buildings would put pressure on the older market, because for a little more than an older apartment which always had problems with the shower drains, you could get in a new building where the shower works properly. That would theoretically cause the prices on existing stock to drop, but there would need to be enough new units that people would still have actual choices to make. At the current vacancy rate it would need to be more than one building, and it would be difficult to convince a developer to not just charge extra for a shiny new building, but given that it’s a provincial problem, some kind of incentive for those who build new apartment buildings and price them sensibly could be a way to fix this issue.
