Expensive Condos in a Cheap Town

We don't live long—two, maybe three years if the cars miss us and the coyotes stay north. But we remember. We have to. Memory is our map, passed from mother to kit, from dumpster to dumpster, through alleyways slick with stale broth, under the Gardiner's concrete sigh, past the tents near Lamport and the benches of Grange Park: the legend of Skinny.

He was a hooman. A skinny one—the kind that comes from too much caffeine and not enough furniture. He wasn't flashy: no neon spandex, no $10k carbon frame. Just a steel bike with patched tires and a bell that rang like a warning, a cheap jingle saying: "I belong here. Now move, you idiot."

He rode every inch of the real downtown, never the soulless sprawl. His world was Etobicoke, High Park, Corsa Italia, Bathurst and Queens Quay and Ossington and Bloor. Through rain and snow and honest road rage, he knew the alley dumplings, Kensington's spice-stained stoops, the way light hit the awnings on Augusta at golden hour. He thought those places were real. Bless his heart.

At Urbane Cyclist, he assembled and later tuned up Olivia Chow's bike—carefully, reverently. Not because she was famous, but because she fought for the things he believed in: transit, tenants, trees. Now she's mayor. Good. The city needs someone who remembers what streets are for. I'm rooting for her. A little.

He used to say he'd buy a place downtown one day. A small box. He believed the old lie—the stupidest lie. Work hard. Play by the rules. Earn your spot. Noble, maybe, like trying to catch a snowflake in a burning building. While he pedaled, they were rezoning, flipping, stacking glass sarcophagi for offshore accounts. The city wasn't built for him—it was built to extract the last dime.

Then came the renoviction—the landlord's special. "We're moving in and doing improvements," they said, with the sincerity of a dumpster lid slamming shut on my paw. The only improvement was to their bank account. Priced him right out of the stench of the alley he loved.

But the joke was on them. And I love a good joke. That eviction was the best thing that ever happened to him—the universe's cold, concrete way of saying: "Your life is shit, but you don't actually have to live here while it's happening."

Toronto calls itself a global metropolis, but its soul is a strip mall with delusions of grandeur. More condo sales offices than community centers. More "artisanal" coffee shops than affordable apartments. More yoga studios than reasons to stay.

And the architecture? Don't get us started. Brutalist monstrosities next to glass towers designed by people who hate sunlight. The AGO expansion? A budget fever dream. The ROM crystal? A failed geometry test. OCAD's tabletop? A student project that got out of hand. This city treats culture like a PR problem to be solved with ugly buildings and overpriced festivals.

Yorkville? A joke wrapped in a Hermès bag. The Danforth? Mediocre at best. Mediocre. Like everything here, trying so hard to be something it's not. Toronto brags about "diversity," but it's just a buffet of cultures stripped of context, served on rent-inflated platters.

The suburbs here are a special kind of hell—endless beige boxes with three-car garages and one-car families. They bulldoze forests to build "nature-inspired communities" named "Whispering Pines" where the only pines are plastic and the only whispering is from realtors calculating commissions.

His family? Oh, the hoomans. A masterclass in denial. His mom, a typical whitelady narcissist —somaticizing every unprocessed trauma into a new specialist appointment on University Avenue, cycling through cardiologists and neurologists because she can't face her own shadow. She'd rather die in a brightly lit waiting room than admit she failed her kids.

His dad? An abuser who rewrote history to play the victim. The classic move. Gaslighting his own children into doubting their pain, leaving Skinny wondering if love was just another word for control. We raccoons don't do that. When a kit's born, the whole den watches. We smell the truth. Maybe that's why we survive—we eat the garbage and move on. No need for a therapist.

But Skinny? He met a woman—not one of the blank-eyed condo dwellers, but another disillusioned soul searching for a humane life. He left. Not in anger, but in clarity. They moved to Ottawa. He got a degree. Now he works in government, making charts that try to bend the arc toward fairness. He rides along the canal every morning, pays rent he can afford, says "good day" to strangers like it's a birthright, not a risk of a knife in the ribs. He didn't lose—he escaped. He got out of the trash heap.

This isn't just Toronto. It's Houston. It's London. It's Sydney. Cities hollowed out by speculation, where the only thing growing faster than rent is despair. But the alternative exists. Pay attention. It exists in smaller places, in slower streets, in communities that still believe a home is a right, not a return on investment. Even we raccoons get to have a den.

Toronto, you keep your "world-class" delusion. Keep your downtown that's 40% Airbnb. Keep your "vibrant" neighborhoods slowly bled dry by speculators. You paved your soul and called it progress. You built a city for capital, not for kin—and wonder why everyone's lonely, angry, and eating takeout alone in a $2,800-a-month shoebox. I know what that shoebox smells like. We all do.

Skinny is gone. But we remember. And every time a new kit is born, we tell them: "Once, there was a hooman who rode like he owned nothing—and everything."

Maybe one day you'll remember too. Until then, we'll be here—washing your bao wrappers in puddles, watching your towers gleam over Kensington Market, waiting for someone to ride like they belong again. We'll be here. Eating your mistakes.