I started thinking about this the other night. For the first 18 years of my life, in other words, up until I moved away to university, I lived for the most part in a detached single-family house in the suburbs of Toronto. But since then, I have almost exclusively lived in apartments/condominiums ranging from converted houses to high-rise buildings.
This was true when I was at the University of Toronto and it was true when I lived in Philadelphia for grad school. In my first year of grad school I lived in a converted house in a questionable area of West Philly. In my second year I lived in a high-rise brutalist building. And in my third year I lived in a small three level walk-up apartment above a pet store and a really great deli. This perhaps not surprising given I was a student.
But since moving back to Toronto, the same has been true. I initially invested and lived in a single-family house, but then decided I preferred living in a condominium and so I have done that ever since. Maybe this changes with kids or maybe it doesn't. But it's interesting to think about the housing types we have chosen or were handed. Location and other factors certainly play a role.
What housing type have you lived in the most throughout your life? Let us know in the comment section below.
Cover photo by Michal GADEK on Unsplash
Brandon Donnelly
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2 single family homes in Waterloo (non-walkable suburbs), 1 SFH in Edinburgh (walkable inner suburb), SFH ranch house in Miami (non-walkable suburb), condo in Waterloo centre, dorm room in England, walk up flat in Florida, walk up flat over the oldest barbershop in USA in New Hampshire, soviet slab tower in High Park and now a condo loft in West Queen West. The latter is by far the best!
Aside from my father's summer home in the Poconos, I've mostly lived in mid-rise apartment buildings. Lately, I've been eschewing the elevators to walk up to the 15th floor for exercise. I met a young woman doing the same thing from the first floor the other day, but I told her I don't run (at my age) and then she ran past me. I heard her slam the door a few floors above me when I left the stairwell on 15. Architecture is life.
Love it. Which city?
I've been back and forth between SFDs and apartments all my life, but for the past 25 years I've been in a small SFD. Interesting variations were the maid's room (chambre de bonne) in which I lived in Paris for a year and the large, Victorian double I bought in Columbus, OH four years out of graduate school. It was the right time to buy -- I could never afford it -- or even to purchase my current house -- now. Definitely downwardly mobile!