Many of us have come to the City from somewhere else, leaving our friends and family behind to make a new life and seek new opportunities. While life in the city is exhilarating and fast-paced, at times it can feel anonymous, transient, superficial and frenzied. For many of us, the extended family is spread far and wide, and is no longer our primary source of rootedness and support. Many have experienced loneliness; and sought to assuage it by clubbing, going to events and concerts, and eventually looking for a tribe of our own through meet-up groups, social organizations, and yes, even church.
Once we graduated from singleness, and became somewhat more established, we found that our modern life is a dispersed one. We work ten miles away from home with people who live twenty miles beyond that. We buy food grown hundreds of miles away from a store in a mall well outside our neighbourhood, from grocery clerks who live in a different part of our broader community. We socialize with people from across town, or from a commuter community other than our own, and worship with people an hour’s drive from each other. Although we live in communities and neighbourhoods, chances are we know few of our neighbours well, and most of them perhaps not at all. Because there is so little overlap in our different spheres of life, there is little chance for socializing, and getting to know each other. Even community institutions, like churches do not really bring neighbourhoods together anymore. Indeed, many community or parish churches are in decline, even in densely populated communities like Toronto. We are so heterogeneous that we have little in common to bring us together.
There is not much sense of consonance, commitment, spontaneity or stability in this new world.
To make matters more difficult, the growing polarization between rich and poor is creating significant economic dislocation. Toronto is becoming a city of high income professionals, executives and civil servants, and low paid retail and service workers. Middle class jobs are disappearing with the increasing computerization of the work place, which facilitates the flattening of organizations by significantly reducing the need for middle management and supervisors. Now even service jobs are threatened with the increasing use of online banking, online retail marketing and self-order and self-checkout terminals at places as diverse as MacDonalds and Home Depot. As a result of paradigm shifts in the economy, businesses have closed or relocated. A growing number of professional and business people are now out of jobs. Some have lost their businesses and / or their homes to default or foreclosure, have recently filed bankruptcy or are on the verge of doing so. To try to make ends meet some people are working at two or even three jobs, many of them part-time. Others are moving out and becoming long-distance commuters, in a bid to reduce their cost of living and keep their jobs in the City.
Part of the price of being a “World Class” city is that the available accommodation is priced accordingly. In December 2017, the average price for a detached home in Toronto was $1,286,605. Semi-detached houses sold for an average of $808,920, an average townhouse was $662,959, and the average condo apartment was $466,592. A Condo apartment with a minimum downpayment of $23,348 would carry for $1,992 per month at the Bank of Montreal’s Smart Mortgage rate of 2.89%. With average condo fees of $365 per month, that mortgage payment would require $94,280 of family income to support. The new mortgage stress test, however would base its calculations on a mortgage of 4.84%; requiring a family income of $116,280 to actually receive the mortgage. On the same basis a semi-detached house would require $175,880 of family income to qualify. Clearly home ownership is becoming out of reach for many in the GTA.
Apartment rental rates for a 2 bedroom apartment averaged $1,860 per month, still requiring a family income of $74,400 based on the bank’s qualifying criteria for a mortgage (3o% percent of gross family income devoted to housing). Many couples would have a difficult time meeting these criteria unless both spouses were working.
One time-honored way to combat isolation and reduce expenses is to band together with others of like mind in intentional communities; living arrangements organized around shared values and conscious decisions rather than government or market forces. Intentional Community is an inclusive term for ecovillages, co-housing, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives, alternative communities, and other projects where people strive together with a common vision. So far the majority of such alternative living arrangements appear to be secular. They attract people looking for relationship, wanting to make less of a carbon footprint or unwilling or unable to take on significant financial stress themselves to acquire suitable housing.
In his book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, Rod Dreher suggests some form of community or cooperative living may not only make economic sense for Christians too; but may also be essential to the preservation of the faith.
“In my 2006 book Crunchy Cons, which explored a countercultural conservative sensibility, I brought up the work of philosopher Alistair MacIntyre, who declared that Western civilization had lost its moorings. The Time was coming, said MacIntyre, when men and women of virtue would understand that continued full participation in mainstream society was not possible for those who wanted to live a life of traditional virtue. These people would find new ways to live in community, just as Saint Benedict, the sixth-century father of Western monasticism, responded to the collapse of Roman civilization by founding a monastic order…The idea is that serious Christian conservatives could no longer live business-as-usual lives … that we have to develop creative, communal solutions to help us hold on to our faith and our values in a world growing ever more hostile to them. We would have to choose to make a decisive leap into a truly countercultural way of living Christianity, or we would doom our children and our children’s children to assimilation. *1
For some with means, that countercultural way of life may be to establish a “Monastery within the home”. Others may move into a neglected part of the community together with other Christians in a deliberate effort to create a thick community of individual homes, places of worship and schools. The ideal is to create a “Christian village”, a community that shares your faith and values, and can support you in your journey. In such a community church could be the social centre, and an integrated part of daily life.
For others, like post-secondary students, young singles arriving in the city to accept employment, older singles and couples looking to downsize but stay close to city amenities and health care, some form of co-operative living arrangement may make more sense. It may also benefit clergy families, who may not have the financial means to afford to live in the city unless the parish they serve provides rectory accommodation. The Housing Allowance policy is to provide sufficient funds to rent a single detached home, with three bedrooms above grade and a study, one four piece bath and a second bathroom on the main floor, air conditioning and six appliances, plus utilities. The housing standard for clergy who are not incumbents is a townhouse or a semi. As can be inferred from the figures quoted above, even renting in Toronto would be a challenge for single clergy, and families unless the spouse was a professional, executive or civil service employee with means to subsidize the housing allowance.
The church has about fifteen hundred years of experience in successfully organizing and operating intentional communities. The guidebook is the monastic rule and its more recent interpretations found within new monastic communities, both Benedictine and Franciscan in charism.
The financial means to create such communities need not come from the Church, but that may be a topic best left to another post.
*1 Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, New York: Sentinel, 2017, pg 2.
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