“Renters of Vancouver” takes an intimate look at how the city's millennials are dealing with the housing crisis.

“I lived for four years in a place called we nicknamed the Farmhouse.

During my time there, the house had no heat. It was infested with rats. It had bedbugs at least twice. It was full of black mould. Honestly, it was a falling-down piece-of-crap house, and I’m amazed they haven’t bulldozed it yet. But it’s still the best place I’ve ever lived.

The Farmhouse was always very communal. I moved in because I’d gone to high school with one of the girls, and when I went to check it out I seemed like a perfect fit for the group. There were four core roommates, but we were also a house of travellers. We would have randos show up all the time to crash on the couch, or people would just appear and live in our garage.

Often we wouldn’t necessarily know they were there. We’d been in the neighbourhood long enough that people understood that we were that house, and that we’d welcome all sorts of people from all over the world to make meals together, play music, and enjoy each other’s company.

One of the roommates even gave birth to her baby there. I left in the morning for work when she’d just started going into labour, and when I came back she was still screaming. She had a midwife and a doula come to the house to coach her through it. The baby took two days to come, and eventually she was born on December 21, so her name was Solstice. 

We were a house of hippies, and our pride and joy was our garden. My roommate Rin was the one who organized it. She studied at UBC and wanted to turn our yard into a farm—and we told her absolutely to go for it. Most of the roommates helped out. I wasn’t personally involved at the planning stage, but I dug a lot of holes in the dirt and planted a lot of vegetables. We mainly grew kale, brassicas, beans, tomatoes, and lots of herbs, and we even made a bit of money off it.

We had five different families in the neighbourhood that we provided food boxes for every week. They would buy-in for the summer, and we would bring their produce to them. Rin delivered it all by bicycle, so it was zero emissions and carbon neutral. And we just ate the leftover food. If you were hungry, you went into the yard.

People continued on for a long time in the house, but we had an unwritten rule that four years was about as much time as one person could stay. It just sort of happened like that. I thought the four-year thing was ridiculous at first, but then when my time came around, all the people I had moved in with had come and gone.

I was a little bit older than everyone else in the Farmhouse at that point, so it was just my time. Those new people stayed and took care of the house for a few years after that, and did the same sort of thing by having a big welcoming community with potluck dinners and lots of music and loveliness. And eventually the landlord got new people in, and the Farmhouse ended.

Now I live in a laneway house about five blocks away. In Vancouver they’ve done this thing in the last few years where you can have your main house on your property, but you can also build a smaller house in the back. My house is on top of the main house’s garage. It’s got a little kitchen downstairs, and little bedroom and a bathroom.

Because everything in Vancouver is so expensive, this is a way to keep the costs down. So now I pay $1000 a month with my fiancé to live in someone else’s backyard. It’s nice to co-habit with just one person, but I miss having any kind of outside space to call my own. The Farmhouse was so good for that.”

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