At 29, Michelle German is part of a generation increasingly frustrated by the rising cost of housing that shuts young professionals, less affluent residents and newcomers out of the city’s well-serviced, transit-connected neighbourhoods.German shares a house downtown with three roommates. She’s a senior manager with Evergreen, a non-profit environmental sustainability agency, and she describes herself as a good saver. But she can’t imagine ferreting away the cash to buy a home — at least not in the foreseeable future. She told the Toronto Region Board of Trade on Tuesday that it’s time for her cohort to speak out, to turn frustration and anger into action. “In terms of . . . advocacy, we’re not pulling our weight,” she later said to the Toronto Star. But that is changing, say planners and social policy experts. They say that Toronto’s YIMBY ranks are already rising. YIMBYs are young urbanites responding to the city’s affordability challenges with a “yes-in-my-backyard” response to denser development. They are demanding family-sized condos, the conversion of single-family houses to duplexes and triplexes and secondary suites in neighbourhoods where their equity-rich parents’ generation are rattling around in near-empty homes.“Absolutely there is a growing anger and frustration,” said University of British Columbia Professor Paul Kershaw, whose research on generational inequality inspired an awareness campaign called, Generation Squeeze, aimed at putting millennial issues on the political radar.Generation Squeeze will be speaking out more in Ontario as the provincial election approaches next June, he said. It is challenging the pervasive idea that high home prices are a good news story when, increasingly, the rising cost of housing is crushing younger generations, who are also facing declining incomes.Hard work doesn’t pay off the way it used to for youn ...
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