Unlikely roommates

This fall, international students have been dealing with enormous housing challenges: a vast influx of students from all over the world arrive, then can’t find anywhere affordable to live. Meanwhile, the country is filled with aging empty-nesters who have more bedrooms than they know what to do with. (Younger generations derisively refer to them as the “overhoused.”)

Goodness Ade, a 20-year-old student from Nigeria studying mobile application design and development at Algonquin College in Ottawa, was looking for a place to live when he stumbled upon a social enterprise startup called Sparrow that connects renters with homeowners looking for lodgers. (It is heavily government funded in an effort to address the housing crisis.) The platform introduced him to a retired government worker and her husband, who had two spare bedrooms in their home in Ottawa. They still have a mortgage and wanted tenants to help them with monthly expenses.

So far, it’s been a successful match. Ade is paying rent he can afford, the homeowners have increased income, and everyone is getting along. In this Maclean’s story, Goodness and his new landlords outline the surprise perks of the arrangement—a model that might, by necessity, become much more common in the years to come.

—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief

In our special issue about the Age of AI, McGill professor Jackie CK Cheung writes that we’ll soon interact with AI-powered avatars when we shop, travel and bank. “Suppose you’re looking for a new lamp for your home. An avatar would ask which room the lamp would be in, and then you’d give your answer. Then it would ask what style of lamp you are looking for, what the colour scheme is in that room, whether you want integrated LED lights, how much space you have. You, as a consumer, may not even have thought about these things,” Cheung says. “But the avatar has been trained to.”

Jim Turner and Craig Daniel first visited Prince Edward County together in the late 1990s, staying with friends who rented a farmhouse every year. They looked at some 90 properties in the area, finally settling on a small plot of land at the south end of the County, with a 40-foot bluff facing Lake Ontario and a bird observatory nearby. Five years later, Turner and Daniel hired the architecture firm Superkül to design their County home and planned their escape from Toronto—they even quit their jobs on the same day.

FROM THE DECEMBER ISSUE

RCMP officer Dean Lerat, a member of Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan, found many of his long-lost relatives using a DNA-testing kit. Now he helps others connect with their own families, which have been fragmented by colonialism. The results tell the story of a whole nation.

Subscribe to Maclean’s
We’re telling the stories you need to read. Subscribe to the magazine today and save up to 70% off the cover price.

Copyright © 2023 All rights reserved

SJC Media, 15 Benton Road, Toronto, ON M6M 3G2

You are receiving this message from St. Joseph Communications because you have given us permission to send you editorial features

Unsubscribe