Life As Performance Art 134

Housing, and income are both a real mess in Vancouver. I am one of the lucky ones. I live in BC Housing, which is to say that my rent is subsidized by the government and the part that I contribute is scaled according to my income of any given year. It is not an ideal arrangement, but it is certainly better than a lot of the alternatives. To live in my city as a low or middle income renter has never been worse. A lot of people have had to leave, others are couch surfing or homeless. Some are sharing accommodations with others. What makes it particularly messy is the lack of options. There was a time when you could simply move if you didn't like where you were living, and it would be easy to find a new place, perhaps in a better neighbourhood, and you could be earning minimum wage or less and still move if and when you wanted to. Now, we are all hostages to where we live. In my case, I couldn't think of moving without putting myself in serious danger. There are simply no low-end rentals that will accommodate my income, which is just a little more than minimum wage, and at my age, living with a roommate is out of the question. I have never approved of living arrangements based on economic necessity alone. There has to be some sense of friendship, kinship, and compatibility that goes beyond a mere living arrangement of convenience. But the economic system that we live under is focussed on one principal, and one principal alone. Greed. If you are even on a medium income and you leave your apartment, chances are that whatever you find will have you paying almost double or more for rent and before you know it, you will for the first time in your life be standing in line at the food bank. I have so far never had to rely on the food bank. I would love to leave this neighbourhood where I have been for seventeen years, since it is unsafe, but the wait lists for other affordable low-income housing are very long, in this city, and since I am already considered safely housed (our housing providers are simply too stupid to factor in the words "unsafe neighbourhood"), I will appear well at the bottom of any wait lists and by the time my turn comes I will either be dead or in a long term care facility. But this is all worst case. True, I do not like my apartment building. Never have. Bad management in the early years (we had some very incompetent and unprofessional live in caretakers, and one early manager who was a fundamentalist Christian, not terribly bright, rather paranoid, ultra-conservative, and simply unable to separate church from state), combined with feeling surrounded by mental illness while coping with living in an unsafe part of town, along with all the noise has never endeared me to this place. I have lived in better places. But this is affordable. And there are trade-offs. Unjust and unfair as this may be, I no longer have housing options in the city where I was born and raised. However, I still live on the quiet side of the building, and the central location makes getting around phenomenally easy for me. And there is the rent. Cheap. Even now that they are jacking it up considerably, I can still afford to get by, and I can still travel. I do have to forgo other luxuries, such as most of you would take for entitlements, but we can never have everything in life. I can afford to travel because I do not have a car, have no bad habits, don't eat in restaurants, nor go to shows, plays, movies or concerts. I effectively do not have a life. But I am able to travel, and meet new people and enjoy my friends and my good health. Nok, it isn't everything, but having everything is not necessarily the best thing in the world, Gentle Reader.