Erik Eastmure, 24, loves his job as a cook in an up-and-coming Riverdale eatery. He is less enamoured with spending half his monthly take-home pay, about $1,000, on rent and utilities for a house he shares with two roommates.Eastmure earns $16 an hour plus tips — a decent wage in the food service industry, he says. But it isn’t enough in Toronto to buy him the privacy he craves and, after rent, groceries and other essentials, there isn’t a lot left to enjoy the city, buy clothes or even visit to the dentist.“There are things I want to buy,” he says. “My laptop just broke; I don’t know how I’m going to afford a new laptop.”He’s among the quarter of Canadians who earn within $3 of their provincial minimum wage. In Ontario, that’s $14 an hour. A new report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) shows the breadth of the country’s rental crisis for full-time (40 hours a week) minimum-wage earners. This crisis, the study’s author says, stems largely from a dearth of new purpose-built rentals since the early 1990s, when the federal government stopped providing tax credits to build them.The study found that a one-bedroom apartment would be affordable to full-time minimum-wage workers in only 70 of 795 Canadian neighbourhoods. A two-bedroom rental would be unaffordable in all but 24 of those neighbourhoods; that’s 3 per cent. With the exception of St. Catharines and Sudbury, all the affordable neighbourhoods were located in smaller Quebec cities.Read more:How desirable is your house? In these 50 Toronto neighbourhoods, they sell significantly over askingHere’s what you’d need to earn to buy a mid-priced home in your Toronto neighbourhood — and what a typical family there earns (Hint: Not nearly enough)In Toronto, it’s worse. Workers need to earn about $34 an hour on average to afford a two-bedroom apartment — the kind of space the CCPA says pro ...
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