NEWMARKET - Daisy Diaz said finding a new place to live in Newmarket is not as easy as it once was.
Searching for a new apartment for more space, Diaz said she has struggled to find something affordable. When she moved to her current home three years ago, she said monthly rent was $1,800, which was doable. Now, she says the market is either $2,000 for single-bedroom basement apartments that are often illegal or $3,000 for the two-bedroom abode she is hoping to find to provide more space.
After living in the Newmarket and Bradford area for 30 years, Diaz said rental prices may force her to move away, with even the Toronto area having more affordable options.
“Why am I spending so much money?” Diaz said. “I like Newmarket, but if it’s not affordable, then what’s the point in being here?”
Housing prices in Newmarket and York Region have remained an issue and the rental market has also followed that trend. While the rental market fluctuates annually, an average one-bedroom unit for rent was about $1,343 on average in the Newmarket/East Gwillimbury area in October 2019, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's rental market survey, compared to $1,547 in October 2024. A two-bedroom unit has gone from $1,403 to $1,897 in the same time-span.
But the market has some problems in providing arange of rental options, Diaz said.
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She said anything under $2,000 tends to be a basement apartment — and in her search, more than half of them are not legal, with no windows, let alone an egress window you can use for escape in case of emergency, which is required by the Ontario Building Code.
She said apartment buildings have also been a struggle. She said she looked at newer Bakersield Apartments on Deerfield Road but was surprised when a one-bedroom unit started at $2,300 monthly before utilities, with a parking spot being another expense of more than $100 a month.
“It makes me want to leave Newmarket,” she said.
The difficulty of the search prompted her to make a post on local Reddit, garnering more than 130 comments.
“I had to move Sept. 2023. Everything was $1700-plus, and 40 per cent utilities for basement …. People were showing up willing to pay a full year up front,” one user recounted. “I looked for three months before giving up. I am staying in my trailer full-time…I’ve given up trying.”
“My husband and I are also trying to find a new apartment and it feels impossible,” another respondent said. “We grew up here and work here but we are considering the fact that we will probably have to move away.”
The demands of landlords looking for credit scores are also an issue, Diaz said. She recounted how her father used identity theft and took out credit card payments in her name when she became an adult, resulting in her having a low credit score. While she said she has positive landlord references and always makes sure to pay her rent on time, the credit score means she gets categorically denied from consideration for several of the places she’s looked at.
“That's the number 1 thing that’s really gotten on my nerves,” she said.
Diaz said she hopes more affordable housing can be built. She also suggested she would like to see more rent control implemented, similar to rent-stabilized apartments in New York City.
Ontario has rent control limiting how much landlords can increase rents by each year, but the province now only applies that in cases where someone has lived in a unit before Nov. 15, 2018. That comes with vacancy decontrol, which means landlords can increase rents by however much they want on an unoccupied apartment, which advocacy groups and campaigns such as Fair Rent Ontario have pushed against.
Diaz said she would also like to see better checks and requirements on landlords to make sure their basement apartments are safe and legal.
“Measures taken to make sure these places are up to their standards and are good enough for people to live in,” she said.
The difficulty of the market stands to delay her move, Diaz said. But she added concerns for how the market could even worsen if she waits too long.
“It’s increased so much in the past few years,” she said. “I just feel like it’s jumping even more. By the time I’m ready to move in the next couple of years, I fear how much more it will jump.”