Category: Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

The Setup

As my friends and regular readers of this blog will know, I’m getting hitched in September and had to vacate my lovely Queen and Spadina house for someplace a little more suitable for two. The house was great, but a tad too expensive for just two people; the rent situation would be made worse by the fact that Wendy won’t even be eligible to work here for a few months. A couple of people suggested sharing the house with roommates. This is not a good idea — a married couple living with roommates is a good setup for a sitcom, but probably a disaster waiting to happen in real life.

Since my landlords J. and B. live in London (England, not Ontario), it would have been difficult for them to advertise the house and show it to potential tenants. They offered me a nice sum of money — enough to cover the expense of hiring professionals to move me to my new place — to act as their agent. I was given the additional responsibility of not only publicizing the place, but also to screen candidates for suitability based on J. and B’s criteria and my understanding of the house and the neighbourhood based on 6 years of living there and being part of the community.

After talking it over with J., we decided to use two different advertising media:

• The Toronto Star Classifieds. This is generally considered to be the best paper for placing classified ads in Accordion City, especially for apartment and hosuing rentals.
• Toronto Craigslist. A long-standing institution of the San Francisco Bay Area, Craigslist is a free city-specific online classified ads service. It’s now explanded to dozens of cities; Accordion City’s is at http://toronto.craigslist.org.

The Ads

Here’s an approximation of the Toronto Star Classfied ad:

It’s the black hole of advertising: so dense that not even information can escape!

J. suggested that we spend a little extra money and pay for flourishes like the border and the white-on-black headline in order to stand out on the page. Seeing as the idea had some merit to it and we weren’t spending my money, I ordered these extras.

The ad got a total of 20 responses, leading to about a dozen viewings, which in turn led to 2 recommendations. Near the end of the week-long ad run, I was called and emailed twice each by an automated reminder system reminding me to book another week if I needed to.

The ad ran for one week in both the paper as well as the web site and cost $520.66.

Here’s what the Craigslist ad looked like:

This conveys considerably more information about the place: its features, what it looks like, a bit of the history and it links to even more information.

In the same week-long period that the Star Classifieds ad ran, this adgarnered 55 responses. Since the ad was free, I ran it longer and it produced more than 85 responses, which was when I stopped counting.

In the three-week period during which the ad ran, it cost me $0.00. Nuthin’. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Honkis de konkis. In the words of my fiancee’s people: bubkes.

Observations

In the case of finding tenants for my old place, which is considerably closer to the city core (here’s a map showing a route from the old place to the heart of the financial district), Craigslist proved to be the better choice. It provided practically infinitely more space than the Star classified, provided an anonymized link to my email address and was free. Not only did it yield considerably more respondents; it also landed more suitable ones too: working professionals used to downtown living, who looked as though they’d take good care of the place. The Star ad drew in a larger proportion of people from the deep burbs who had that sort of attitude that the burbs was where one lived and downtown was a grittier kind of mall or playground where you could shop, get drunk, act like an idiot and start fights.

The winning candidate was someone who’d seen the Craigslist listing, not the Star classified. You should keep in mind that there are many circumstances in which the Star classifieds will beat Craigslist. As my housemate Rob and I have observed in our respective apartment-hunts, the farther from the city core you look, the better the Star‘s selection becomes. In the neighbourhood where I was looking (here’s a map showing a route from the new place to the heart of the financial district), the selection of places was much better in the Star than in Craigslist. I found my current place through the Star classifieds.

(Point of information: I also found the old place through the Star classfieds, but that was back in 1999. Internet use wasn’t as common as it is now, and Craigslist was still largely limited to they Bay Area then.)

For the purpose of finding tenants for my old place, Craigslist soundly beat the Toronto Star classifieds. It yielded considerably more candidates and was infinitely cheaper. Well done, Craigslist; I salute you with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!

Well we’re movin’ on up,
To the [west] side.
To a deluxe apartment in the sky.
Movin’ on up,
To the [west] side.
We finally got a piece of the pie.

Now we’re up in the big leagues,
Gettin’ our turn at bat.
As long as we live, it’s you and me baby,
There ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.

— A slightly modified version of the theme from The Jeffersons

Last Wednesday, after six years of life in the house I liked to call “Big Trouble in Little China”, three guys from Tippet-Richardson loaded my stuff (as well as some detritus from various housemates) onto a red truck and made the journey represented in the map below:

Click the image to see the full Google map.

See that big green mass in the lower left-hand corner? That’s how big High Park is. Click the image to see the full satellite photo.

I went to high school at De La Salle College “Oaklands” in the 80’s, during the era in which a guy with a goofy name — “Keanu? What the hell kind of a name is that?” — played defence for the hockey team so well that he was nicknamed “The Wall”. (He has since earned the nickname for his acting.) I took advantage of the school’s location and ended up in the usual adolescent hangout neighbourhoods in the city’s core, starting with the Eaton Centre and eventually working my way to Queen Street West.

In high school, Queen West and the surrounding areas were almost magical to me. It was the home of geek meccas such as the computer store Batteries Included, electronics shops such as Arkon Electronics and Active Surplus (only Active Surplus remains today, and in a smaller location), the science fiction store Bakka (where a young Cory Doctorow worked) and several comic book stores, including the legendary Silver Snail. Steve’s Music Store, and more importantly, its keyboard department, was also located on Queen West. I developed my penchant for wearing blazers and vests in the shops of Queen West, at new clothing stores like Fab (now occupied by Lush) and vintage places like Groovy (which is still in the same location). My sister’s friends and mine moved in the same circles, and we often partied en masse in the area’s clubs. Queen West was a home-away-from-home, and I promised myself that I’d live there someday.

In 1999, my sister Eileen, her then-fiance Richard and I were looking for a place in which to live. I lived with her in a condo at the corner of Yonge and Carlton, and they asked me to live with them as my sister and I get along quite well and hey — there’s nothing like a third renter with a profession to keep the living standards up to Eisenhower-era levels.

While the Yonge/Carlton location was quite good (central and right on top of a subway station) and the condo had great amenities, the place lacked a certain something. Yonge Street, for those of you not familiar with Accordion City, is the main drag, packed with fast food chains, dollar stores, “grey-market” electronics and camera shops and a couple of places to buy porn. If your life’s goal is to eat burgers, pizza and sushi and purchase DVDs and machines that play them, it could be heaven. I had different plans.

We lucked out. Eileen noticed a small ad in the Toronto Star for a place in the Queen/Spadina area and phoned the number. She made an appointment to see the place and when she saw it, she called my cell phone immediately.

“You’d better see this place as soon as possible,” she said.

“How soon?” I asked. “I’m, uh, wooing.” I was in the Annex — not far away from the house — enjoying a coffee with a charming young lady whom I was trying to save from a boyfriend who’d long passed his “sell-by date”.

“Joe, this place will let you woo like no other. Take a look now.”

Dude, I was SO the guy in the doorway, yo.

I know my sister well enough to know to take her recommendations seriously. I bade my young lady friend farewell and biked over to the house my sister was raving about. After a quick look about the house — 15-foot ceilings in the living and dining room, interesting planes and angles in the ceiling, hardwood floors, exposed brick wall — I looked at the landlord and quoted Homer Simpson: “I have only two questions: How much? and Give it to me!“

In my six years at that house, I have lived in every bedroom. When we first moved in, Richard and Eileen took the upstairs bedroom, while I used the downstairs rooms. Initially, I slept in the smaller bedroom and used the larger one as my office. Later, when I stopped working for myself and started working for OpenCola, I put my bed in the larger bedroom and the office in the smaller one. When Richard and Eileen moved out in 2001, I moved to the upstairs bedroom, with its hardwood floor and south wall made entirely of glass.

The house served me well. It was stumbling distance from several of my regular haunts: Tequila Bookworm (where I met The Waitress), the Bovine Sex Club (the original home of Kickass Karaoke), Velvet Underground (where I danced every Saturday night) and Amato Pizza, which became my designated late-night busking area. It was the site of many legendary parties, including the one with the hot tub on an army truck.

The neighbours from across the street still haven’t forgiven me for this one.

The house landed me an appearance on Love By Design, a home decorating show disguised as a “Dating Game”-type show in which a woman chooses her date based on three guys’ houses. Most importantly, it was nice enough to impress my lovely finacee, who must’ve been relieved that I didn’t live in a “hacker hole” with nothing but computers, empty pizza boxes and my own filth. (Worry not: the computer gear is there; it’s all just tastefully ensconced.)

Although I loved the place, it was time to leave. I’m getting married in September and my housemate Rob is getting married in October. While having two married couples living under the same roof with a single roommate would make for a great sitcom, I think that it would be quite unworkable in real life.

I notified our landlords of our plan to move out. They live in the UK, which would make it difficult for them to find new tenants for the place. They came up with the idea of paying me a nice sum to place ads, show the place and screen potential tenants. After showing the place to about 30 groups of people, I made a recommendation and the landlords agreed. On Wednesday, I met up with one of the landlords and the new tenant, during which time I handed over my keys and garage door opener.

“Wow,” said the landlord, “it actually looked bigger with the furniture in it.”

It was true — there’s something about the design of the place that has that effect.

Before I left, I kissed my fingers and pressed them against the brick wall in the living room. I then locked up the house for the last time, took the last of my stuff to the car and drove away.

I’ll miss that house.