Some People Flip Real Estate. I Flip Men. - The New York Times | Canada News Media
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Some People Flip Real Estate. I Flip Men. – The New York Times

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Give me a fixer-upper and I’ll turn him into someone desirable — for someone else.

I am a man flipper. I meet a man, fix him up and flip him to someone else. Unlike people who flip real estate — buying houses, renovating them and selling them for a tidy profit — I see no gain from this arrangement, only loss.

I don’t want to be doing this, but something attracts me to men who are emotionally withdrawn, and I have a talent for drawing them out. For their future wives and girlfriends, apparently.

I once saw a meme about the “dating pool” in midlife that featured an empty swimming pool with lawn chairs and debris blown into it. I laughed because it was so true. I never expected to be dating again in my 40s. I thought I had avoided this fate when I married in my 20s.

My first love was a heavy-drinking academic who quit drinking after we broke up and settled down with a wife and a baby on an acre in the Pacific Northwest. My second love was an emotionally stunted biologist who drove a Toyota Tacoma and listened to Kid Rock but within whom I recognized, and nurtured, a deep tenderness. He broke up with me the day after he finally told me that he loved me (I guess it scared him), and he later married the woman I had lived with when I was dating him.

After those two heartbreaks, my friends joked that my secret talent was teaching men how to love someone — just not me. I thought I had broken the pattern when I married, but the man who became my husband turned out to be mercurial and cruel. We had a child together, but as hard as I tried, I was never able to fix him. At least not for me.

After our divorce, he married a woman a decade my junior, and I wondered if all the work I had done making him own up to his behavior and understand the need to change would mean that his new wife would be spared the mistreatment I received. I wished a calmer marriage for her, which they appear to have achieved.

Years passed, and in my post-married life, the men flipping resumed. There was the former monk who abstained from everything, including sex, but when I stopped seeing him, he moved into a comfortable relationship with an acupuncturist. Then the wildland firefighter who chased me for years and disappeared when I was finally available. All of those setbacks had turned me into a woman who was disillusioned, celibate and ready to give up.

Then, at 40, I met Rich. He was sitting across a bar and looked like he was 25 (he turned out to be 32). Tall and skinny with kind eyes, he felt safe to me, like someone I would never really fall for — not in the way where I lost control.

I invited him over, had sex with him, told him that we should do it again sometime and entered his number into my phone. I knew it was risky, but he was so sweet and earnest. That safe feeling wasn’t something I was used to.

Because I’m a divorced mother and protective of my son, I only let Rich visit when my boy was at his father’s house, so we saw each other every other weekend. It was intensely casual but also weirdly stable. These weren’t booty calls; they were planned visits. I cooked us dinner, and we cuddled.

We liked each other, but our dynamic was that I took care of him. I knew that for a relationship to be serious, I needed someone who took care of me too. Still, I enjoyed our time together and wanted it to last.

As we grew to know each other, I learned that he was old-fashioned in matters of the heart. The youngest of seven children, he was the family baby. He was strictly monogamous, and I never worried that he was seeing anyone else because he was honest — almost to a fault in how he routinely expressed his hesitations and doubts.

He also didn’t try to charm, flatter or otherwise tell me what I wanted to hear, which was both disarming and strangely nice. My marriage had made it hard for me to trust men, but I trusted Rich.

The first time that we almost broke up was when he came over and said, “I feel like we should break up. I just have a feeling that this is going to end terribly.”

I looked at him for a long time, then said, “But what if it doesn’t?”

Someone asked me once where I thought my resilience came from. I hesitated, then said, “For women, too often, I think what we mistake as resilience is actually just endurance.”

I don’t know if my endurance has served me well. It takes a special kind of endurance to look at the train barreling down the tracks and say, “But what if it doesn’t hit me this time?”

Rich and I had more breakups after that. I started to want more, but our lives were incompatible, so we broke up and remained friends. Then I accepted a job 70 miles away, so it seemed OK for us to have sex “just one more time” before I moved, but then I wasn’t moving that far away, so it seemed OK if he came to visit occasionally.

Then the visits were so nice that they became regular, then we spent four days together while my son was at his father’s over Thanksgiving break, and during that visit, when I had the beginnings of a cold, Rich walked my dog for me, brought me tea and cooked for me.

Suddenly, I sat at my kitchen table while he made cornbread and thought, “Oh, no. He’s taking care of me now. This is dangerous territory.”

And what does it say about me that when a relationship starts to get good is when the dread creeps in? What does it say about my history of heartbreak that I assume men will leave me when they finally learn how to love me? In horror movies, things are always calmest just before the monster springs from the closet. I have spent most of my adult life anticipating monsters.

And they arrived. In January last year, just before the pandemic, he had a crisis of faith and broke up with me. This time, it lasted. Neither of us entered this relationship thinking it would be forever, but still I was devastated.

There is a peculiar kind of bittersweetness to living with a broken heart in winter, even more so while socially distancing alone with my son. I kept expecting to wake up and not miss Rich, but each morning was a disappointment.

It turned out that he missed me too, so in July, while my son was at his father’s place for a long summer stretch, we got back together, and we were honest with each other — that we didn’t know where our lives were going, but we could be committed to each other while holding space for that unknowing.

I have never existed well in a space of uncertainty, but my divorce taught me that there are no guarantees in relationships. Maybe, I thought, just this once, the train would jump the tracks before impact. But if it didn’t, I knew I would have the endurance to survive it.

In the eight months that we have been back together, we have finally said “I love you,” and he has met my son (they like each other). We have also talked about making a home together. I send him listings from Zillow, and he offers commentary. I know that neither of us has ever loved another in this way, and that what we have is special.

Still, he has told me that he thinks he wants to have children someday, and more children are not in my future. The monsters loom. I have to live with this unknowing. My endurance keeps me here: Watching the train and hoping that it will jump the tracks. He told me the other day, “You’ve helped me grow so much. I’m a different person than I was when I met you.”

I know it’s true, and when I look at him, I can see his future with someone very lucky, which is why I don’t want to flip this one just yet. Maybe, this time, that very lucky person will be me.

Kelly Sundberg, who teaches writing at Ashland University in Ohio, is the author of the memoir “Goodbye, Sweet Girl.

Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.

To find previous Modern Love essays, Tiny Love Stories and podcast episodes, visit our archive.

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Here are some facts about British Columbia’s housing market

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Housing affordability is a key issue in the provincial election campaign in British Columbia, particularly in major centres.

Here are some statistics about housing in B.C. from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s 2024 Rental Market Report, issued in January, and the B.C. Real Estate Association’s August 2024 report.

Average residential home price in B.C.: $938,500

Average price in greater Vancouver (2024 year to date): $1,304,438

Average price in greater Victoria (2024 year to date): $979,103

Average price in the Okanagan (2024 year to date): $748,015

Average two-bedroom purpose-built rental in Vancouver: $2,181

Average two-bedroom purpose-built rental in Victoria: $1,839

Average two-bedroom purpose-built rental in Canada: $1,359

Rental vacancy rate in Vancouver: 0.9 per cent

How much more do new renters in Vancouver pay compared with renters who have occupied their home for at least a year: 27 per cent

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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B.C. voters face atmospheric river with heavy rain, high winds on election day

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VANCOUVER – Voters along the south coast of British Columbia who have not cast their ballots yet will have to contend with heavy rain and high winds from an incoming atmospheric river weather system on election day.

Environment Canada says the weather system will bring prolonged heavy rain to Metro Vancouver, the Sunshine Coast, Fraser Valley, Howe Sound, Whistler and Vancouver Island starting Friday.

The agency says strong winds with gusts up to 80 kilometres an hour will also develop on Saturday — the day thousands are expected to go to the polls across B.C. — in parts of Vancouver Island and Metro Vancouver.

Wednesday was the last day for advance voting, which started on Oct. 10.

More than 180,000 voters cast their votes Wednesday — the most ever on an advance voting day in B.C., beating the record set just days earlier on Oct. 10 of more than 170,000 votes.

Environment Canada says voters in the area of the atmospheric river can expect around 70 millimetres of precipitation generally and up to 100 millimetres along the coastal mountains, while parts of Vancouver Island could see as much as 200 millimetres of rainfall for the weekend.

An atmospheric river system in November 2021 created severe flooding and landslides that at one point severed most rail links between Vancouver’s port and the rest of Canada while inundating communities in the Fraser Valley and B.C. Interior.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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No shortage when it comes to B.C. housing policies, as Eby, Rustad offer clear choice

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British Columbia voters face no shortage of policies when it comes to tackling the province’s housing woes in the run-up to Saturday’s election, with a clear choice for the next government’s approach.

David Eby’s New Democrats say the housing market on its own will not deliver the homes people need, while B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad saysgovernment is part of the problem and B.C. needs to “unleash” the potential of the private sector.

But Andy Yan, director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University, said the “punchline” was that neither would have a hand in regulating interest rates, the “giant X-factor” in housing affordability.

“The one policy that controls it all just happens to be a policy that the province, whoever wins, has absolutely no control over,” said Yan, who made a name for himself scrutinizing B.C.’s chronic affordability problems.

Some metrics have shown those problems easing, with Eby pointing to what he said was a seven per cent drop in rent prices in Vancouver.

But Statistics Canada says 2021 census data shows that 25.5 per cent of B.C. households were paying at least 30 per cent of their income on shelter costs, the worst for any province or territory.

Yan said government had “access to a few levers” aimed at boosting housing affordability, and Eby has been pulling several.

Yet a host of other factors are at play, rates in particular, Yan said.

“This is what makes housing so frustrating, right? It takes time. It takes decades through which solutions and policies play out,” Yan said.

Rustad, meanwhile, is running on a “deregulation” platform.

He has pledged to scrap key NDP housing initiatives, including the speculation and vacancy tax, restrictions on short-term rentals,and legislation aimed at boosting small-scale density in single-family neighbourhoods.

Green Leader Sonia Furstenau, meanwhile, says “commodification” of housing by large investors is a major factor driving up costs, and her party would prioritize people most vulnerable in the housing market.

Yan said it was too soon to fully assess the impact of the NDP government’s housing measures, but there was a risk housing challenges could get worse if certain safeguards were removed, such as policies that preserve existing rental homes.

If interest rates were to drop, spurring a surge of redevelopment, Yan said the new homes with higher rents could wipe the older, cheaper units off the map.

“There is this element of change and redevelopment that needs to occur as a city grows, yet the loss of that stock is part of really, the ongoing challenges,” Yan said.

Given the external forces buffeting the housing market, Yan said the question before voters this month was more about “narrative” than numbers.

“Who do you believe will deliver a better tomorrow?”

Yan said the market has limits, and governments play an important role in providing safeguards for those most vulnerable.

The market “won’t by itself deal with their housing needs,” Yan said, especially given what he described as B.C.’s “30-year deficit of non-market housing.”

IS HOUSING THE ‘GOVERNMENT’S JOB’?

Craig Jones, associate director of the Housing Research Collaborative at the University of British Columbia, echoed Yan, saying people are in “housing distress” and in urgent need of help in the form of social or non-market housing.

“The amount of housing that it’s going to take through straight-up supply to arrive at affordability, it’s more than the system can actually produce,” he said.

Among the three leaders, Yan said it was Furstenau who had focused on the role of the “financialization” of housing, or large investors using housing for profit.

“It really squeezes renters,” he said of the trend. “It captures those units that would ordinarily become affordable and moves (them) into an investment product.”

The Greens’ platform includes a pledge to advocate for federal legislation banning the sale of residential units toreal estate investment trusts, known as REITs.

The party has also proposed a two per cent tax on homes valued at $3 million or higher, while committing $1.5 billion to build 26,000 non-market units each year.

Eby’s NDP government has enacted a suite of policies aimed at speeding up the development and availability of middle-income housing and affordable rentals.

They include the Rental Protection Fund, which Jones described as a “cutting-edge” policy. The $500-million fund enables non-profit organizations to purchase and manage existing rental buildings with the goal of preserving their affordability.

Another flagship NDP housing initiative, dubbed BC Builds, uses $2 billion in government financingto offer low-interest loans for the development of rental buildings on low-cost, underutilized land. Under the program, operators must offer at least 20 per cent of their units at 20 per cent below the market value.

Ravi Kahlon, the NDP candidate for Delta North who serves as Eby’s housing minister,said BC Builds was designed to navigate “huge headwinds” in housing development, including high interest rates, global inflation and the cost of land.

Boosting supply is one piece of the larger housing puzzle, Kahlon said in an interview before the start of the election campaign.

“We also need governments to invest and … come up with innovative programs to be able to get more affordability than the market can deliver,” he said.

The NDP is also pledging to help more middle-class, first-time buyers into the housing market with a plan to finance 40 per cent of the price on certain projects, with the money repayable as a loan and carrying an interest rate of 1.5 per cent. The government’s contribution would have to be repaid upon resale, plus 40 per cent of any increase in value.

The Canadian Press reached out several times requesting a housing-focused interview with Rustad or another Conservative representative, but received no followup.

At a press conference officially launching the Conservatives’ campaign, Rustad said Eby “seems to think that (housing) is government’s job.”

A key element of the Conservatives’ housing plans is a provincial tax exemption dubbed the “Rustad Rebate.” It would start in 2026 with residents able to deduct up to $1,500 per month for rent and mortgage costs, increasing to $3,000 in 2029.

Rustad also wants Ottawa to reintroduce a 1970s federal program that offered tax incentives to spur multi-unit residential building construction.

“It’s critical to bring that back and get the rental stock that we need built,” Rustad said of the so-called MURB program during the recent televised leaders’ debate.

Rustad also wants to axe B.C.’s speculation and vacancy tax, which Eby says has added 20,000 units to the long-term rental market, and repeal rules restricting short-term rentals on platforms such as Airbnb and Vrbo to an operator’s principal residence or one secondary suite.

“(First) of all it was foreigners, and then it was speculators, and then it was vacant properties, and then it was Airbnbs, instead of pointing at the real problem, which is government, and government is getting in the way,” Rustad said during the televised leaders’ debate.

Rustad has also promised to speed up approvals for rezoning and development applications, and to step in if a city fails to meet the six-month target.

Eby’s approach to clearing zoning and regulatory hurdles includes legislation passed last fall that requires municipalities with more than 5,000 residents to allow small-scale, multi-unit housing on lots previously zoned for single family homes.

The New Democrats have also recently announced a series of free, standardized building designs and a plan to fast-track prefabricated homes in the province.

A statement from B.C.’s Housing Ministry said more than 90 per cent of 188 local governments had adopted the New Democrats’ small-scale, multi-unit housing legislation as of last month, while 21 had received extensions allowing more time.

Rustad has pledged to repeal that law too, describing Eby’s approach as “authoritarian.”

The Greens are meanwhile pledging to spend $650 million in annual infrastructure funding for communities, increase subsidies for elderly renters, and bring in vacancy control measures to prevent landlords from drastically raising rents for new tenants.

Yan likened the Oct. 19 election to a “referendum about the course that David Eby has set” for housing, with Rustad “offering a completely different direction.”

Regardless of which party and leader emerges victorious, Yan said B.C.’s next government will be working against the clock, as well as cost pressures.

Yan said failing to deliver affordable homes for everyone, particularly people living on B.C. streets and young, working families, came at a cost to the whole province.

“It diminishes us as a society, but then also as an economy.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

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