BY: SINEAD MULHERN
Maybe there was once a time when living alone was the dream. You get free range of the house. Clean the kitchen and it stays clean. Feel like making dinner at 10 p.m.? No problem. Wear your underwear around the house. Never be disturbed by other people’s noise. And dating? No awkward next morning roommate encounters for the new beau. Living alone= perfect.
Solo living in our culture is so often thought of to be the mark of truly successful adulthood too. Living with the parents signifies a general not-togetherness. Live with roommates and you’re on your way, the number of people living in the house showing the level of maturity. Having one or two roommates is classy, but five or six and you might as well still be a freshman. Live alone, you’re a real adult. If you own the place, you’ve got it made right?
Groups of adults in Vancouver and California are proving none of this to be true. They have created the beginnings of a movement that is quite the opposite of the tiny homes movement in a way and yet similar in that they are saving huge amounts of money.
They’re living in giant, luxurious palaces for cheap rent.
That’s right. Some people live large to cut costs. It sounds like an oxymoron and nearly impossible and yet groups of adults in Vancouver are pulling off high-class living without slaving away to hand over all of their earnings to greedy landlords. In one shared home, the tenants pay $750 a month to live in a Spanish-style 1930’s mansion worth over five million dollars.
The catch is that the dream house is owned by overseas Chinese developers. Therefore the landlord is absent. Need someone handy to come fix the leaky sink? Out of luck. Plus, developers have their own intents for this kind of investment and can evict tenants at any time. And in a home this size, upkeep can be notorious.
But that’s a price probably most would be willing to pay, especially considering that Vancouver is known for its exorbitantly-priced rental units. Just an average one bedroom apartment will funnel at least $1,000 out of tenant bank accounts each month.
Like with any good rental, the gems are worth waiting for. Sometimes you’ve got to dig for them. That wasn’t the case for the lavish Spanish pad though. The tenants found it on Craigslist listed in with the bachelor pads and basement units.
Of course mansions aren’t as common as those basement units, but this home wasn’t a once-off. Several of the tenants moved in after leaving their three-storey lighthouse rental, they told Huffington Post recently.
A major obstacle though is that Vancouver requires no more than five adults to be living in a home at the same time. This was a regulation set up to eliminate bawdy houses. So for some groups of people, they are just risking breaking that law to come home to complete luxury.
Whether or not mansion living for cheap turns into a trend, we’ll have to wait and see. But this, micro condos, tiny home and treehouse living, are all evidence that people are over the exhausting payments of mainstream living.
Sources: kitsilano.ca, thetyee.cachefly.net
