Things were supposed to work out differently for Rae-Leigh MacInnes. The registered massage therapist should be living her best life, plying her trade in a picturesque, state-of-the-art clinic in the Annapolis Valley. But now, due to a series of completely normal minor mishaps, MacInnes has nowhere to live.
MacInnes decided to move to the valley and pursue her dream job because it felt like the right time in her life. Her son was now an adult and had finished school. They decided he could take over the lease of their shared Halifax apartment and find a roommate, and MacInnes would move to the valley to open up a clinic with her business partner. Not only was the clinic going to be a state-of-the-art facility, but it was also going to be MacInnes’ home. It seemed like a very good plan.
But even the best-laid plans can be ruined by human fragility. When MacInnes’ business partner got too sick to open the clinic, her plans for the future started to fall apart. She could not afford to fund the clinic on her own. But failures in life are part of the human experience, so she rolled with it and refocused on continuing her career in Halifax.
MacInnes says there was a stark difference in the modern rental market compared to the last time she had to find an apartment over 10 years ago. Back then “rental units were offering incentives for you to come, you know, they'd offer a month free or they'd offer you a free TV if you went with them,” she tells The Coast over the phone. “You don't see that anymore.”
Looking for a permanent place to live in Halifax is hell for renters these days because it’s like adding a second or third full-time job on top of the one or two jobs most renters already have. “I went through every single place I could find on [Facebook] Marketplace, every single place I could find on Kijiji, the only thing I could do was just keep refreshing. As soon as the place would come available, try to get on top of it,” says MacInnes. It was demoralizing. “I was used to having a long-term home. So this, to me, was very disruptive to my quality of life.”
Humans like to pretend we are above the biological limitations of our animal peers, but the fact is we need to eat, we need to drink water and we need to sleep.
Every day.
A psychologist named Abraham Harold Maslow came up with something called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which identifies shelter, AKA a home, as a basic necessity of life. This makes sense—humans have to sleep for a third of the day, and during that time we are at our most vulnerable. Not having a safe place to sleep increases your chance of death. Sleeping outside in just your clothes with no protection from the elements? Increased chance of death. Couch surfing from friend’s place to friend’s place? Increased chance of death.
While most people may not consciously acknowledge the threat being unhoused poses to our safety, the part of our brains responsible for our survival starts responding to and amping up the stress. If children are exposed to this level of stress, they will have adult lives plagued by fear, anxiety and poor impulse control. Statistically, children affected by being unhoused will forever be held back by the governmental failures of their youth.
Unable to find a place in Halifax, MacInnes had to cast her net wider and wider, eventually finding a place in Truro. She was able to find a one-bedroom in a clean and safe building with en suite laundry for $1,195 a month. Since registered massage therapists are normally able to easily find work, and because this apartment was such a good deal, she decided to risk the move to Truro without a job lined up.
For a short period of time, she was happy. Life was settling and she had a good place to live. But it was still a struggle to find work. “In Halifax, I get offered jobs daily, I'm turning down jobs all the time. So to be out there and there's no jobs, it was really eye-opening.” She was happy to keep living in Truro off of her savings until she found work. But then, oh deer—tragedy.
“There's a lot of deer in Truro, I don't know if you're aware,” says MacInnes. One of those deer found her car while she was travelling at speed on the highway. It totalled her car. The insurance payout was not enough to replace the car and so “that put me on this road back to Halifax because I could no longer stay in Truro without a car.” Due to Truro’s lack of public transportation or livability without a vehicle, MacInnes’ employment options there were limited to those she could physically walk to.
Unwilling to make the same mistake as before, MacInnes lined up a job in Halifax before moving back. But like before, she still couldn’t find a place to live. Even though she’s gainfully employed in a middle-class job, making well over the median income for a single-person household in Nova Scotia—$36,000 a year—and the national average which comes in at $41,000 a year, she still find herself without a home.
Her story is not unique. On average, single-family households, i.e. people who live by themselves, can no longer afford to rent a place in Halifax on their own—even with “well-paying” middle-class jobs.
All this means that now, when MacInnes ends her work day, she goes to someone else’s home in Halifax, settles into their couch or spare bedroom and scrolls through Marketplace and Kijiji trying to find a rental of her own. It’s a fun new twist on the doom scrolling a lot of us are familiar with. Normally doom scrolling causes people to be smothered by a looming existential dread about something big and horrible over which they have no power, like climate change. Instead, people who are trying to find a rental in Halifax get to experience a hyperlocal, boutique, artisanal, existential dread. Because the fact of the matter for Haligonians is that more and more of us—people like MacInnes who are working full-time “real jobs”—are still ending up unhoused.
