The Poverty Line

There’s a line that runs across my street.

Not the one economists talk about. Not exactly.

This one is literal, painted right into the pavement, dividing this little section of the world neatly in two.

On my side, low-rise condos cling together, clutching each other in a desperate patchwork of survival.

Across the street, single-family homes stretch out behind wide lawns and double garages.

From above, you might think it was all one neighbourhood.

But when you walk it—really walk it—you can feel the split in your bones.

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Just a few years ago, I was on the brink of homelessness… again.

It wasn’t failure. It was inherited wealth—the kind I was born without, and others were born into.

I had been renting a home for myself and four children through a rent-to-own agreement, one of those delicate middle-class dreams you tell yourself might work if you just take care of everything. I was overjoyed to be transitioning into home ownership. I replaced old carpet, painted walls, even renovated the basement so each child would have their own room. Outside, I brought the gardens back to life, pulling weeds until my hands blistered, watching colour return to soil that had been left lifeless by the developers and hardened by the shadeless streets. I invested everything: time, labor, savings, hope.

Then the housing market exploded. Suddenly, that home I’d been promised was “no longer available.” The owners could make more selling it outright.

So, a For Sale sign was planted in the earth I’d nursed back to health and the front door, the one I’d once considered the portal to my safety, my security, my home, was now laden with a hefty realtor’s lock-box.

I remember the sound it made whenever I opened that door:

Defeat.

Rage.

Hopelessness.

Yet none of those words quite covers the quiet humiliation of realizing that ownership, stability, even safety, were never really mine to hold.

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Those were terrifying months. I wasn’t just at risk of losing a home, I was at risk of not having enough space to keep my children. Rentals were scarce and shrinking, especially anything large enough for a family. None of them were even remotely affordable; the few that existed cost nearly one and a half times what a mortgage would for the same space.

But I’d already given up too much money to make the rent-to-own work, and now I was scraping together whatever I could, piecing together a down payment, praying that something, anything, might appear within my meagre qualification range.

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Fortunately, with the help of a great community, a sprinkle of a miracle, and a handful of pure grit, I found another place in the nick of time: a small condo I could almost afford. It sits on the end of a building older than dirt and came with a broken fridge and dryer. But it has a roof. Walls.

Beyond those walls, though, the building’s guts are beyond aging, the roof was just replaced at great expense, and every board meeting is a painful debate between impossible choices: Do we raise fees and risk pushing people out, or do we gamble another year and hope the building holds?

These aren’t decisions about upping the monthly fees by hundreds of dollars. They’re about tens. Ten, twenty dollars a month, which here, means the difference between someone making their bills or taking their kids for a picnic at the park.

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Another thing: we live like sardines. Families stacked on top of one another, 400-square-foot floors divided into survival. Basements turned into micro-apartments, living rooms triple up—mealtimes, as dining rooms, nights, as places to sleep. You can tell how long someone’s been here by how creatively they’ve learned to fold their life into corners.

And every day, I walk the “poverty line”—the thin strip of asphalt that separates my condo complex from the homes across the street.

Across that line, the lawns are wide and green, mowers humming in synchronized leisure. Driveways yawn, boats are parked neatly between three of four cars.

Who lives in these houses, you ask. Young professionals, maybe? Families with steady jobs and golden retrievers?

No.

Most of the homes belong to retirees now—people who sold their houses for millions and bought these single-family homes at prices no working family could touch. The yards are wide, the garages full, and the lights stay on even when no one’s home. Garages overflow with woodworking tools, expensive hobbies, and luxury cars that rumble through the summer and disappear into storage for the winter months. Yards sprawl like a quiet claim: We made it. We deserve this.

I don’t begrudge them that, but I can’t help noticing what the line means.

Up the street, there’s one exception, a single house split between at least two families, six or seven kids between them. That feels like the only way anyone can make it work anymore.

On our side, we budget to the bone. Share tools, recipes, childcare. We take turns patching things until we can’t patch anymore.

Across the street, the houses rest easy.

The difference isn’t just wealth. It’s inheritance. Not only the kind that comes through money, but the kind that comes through structure, safety, timing.

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As a writer and advocate for affordable housing, I often think about this system.

Writers are among the most impoverished professionals in society; yet, the work we do is what makes society legible. We document the quiet, the overlooked, the broken things that policy forgets. We preserve what would otherwise disappear.

And still, most of us live on the margins of our own words.

I work two jobs, a full-time one to survive, a part-time one to create. I teach, I write, I parent, I budget, I patch. I live inside a system that relies on the unpaid emotional labor of people like me—the ones who hold things together just enough for others to keep looking away.

Sometimes people tell me I’m resilient.

But resilience is just another word for “you had no choice.”

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Final Musing

When I walk the poverty line now, I look both ways.

On one side: the homes that hold generations of ease.

On the other: the cracked patios and drying laundry, the small acts of survival disguised as routine.

There’s something about that in-between space.

Standing there, you see both the struggle and the illusion.

You learn how easily stability tilts, how thin the ground beneath it really is.

Yet every evening, when the sun hits the roofs just right, the light spills across both sides the same and, no matter how divided the world seems, the light doesn’t choose. It simply falls—steady, faithful.

Knowing we all belong to the same story.

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