Emerging from the Underground
AN UPDATE ON THE MILLENNIAL UNDERGROUND: 1 YEAR LATER
Two years ago, my family and I were stuck underground.
As one of the many young families facing housing insecurity, I decided to write through some of the thoughts and feelings that accompanied being a family of four living in a basement suite in one of the least affordable cities in the world: Vancouver, BC.
Readers, I have an update: we have emerged from the underground.
In October 2022, we moved. My Canadian husband acquired his US green card that spring. Once he’d been through the immigration process, we had six months to “land,” aka, officially move to the United States.
Even though we’d been planning this move (and complaining about the basement for years), the decision to take action wasn’t straightforward. For one, Joel couldn’t continue at his current job over the border, which meant an out-of-country job hunt. My job travels well, but all my freelance clients were Canadian, meaning my income would be subject to an unfriendly exchange rate as soon as we landed in the States.
On top of that, the uncertainty of the US political and social climate kept holding us back. For example, the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, TX, happened just weeks after Joel completed the immigration process, halting our decision making process for a good chunk of time. I also had concerns about re-entering American Evangelicalism and finding a faith home that resisted polarization. The question nagged at us: did we want to raise our kids here?
For months, we said we’d do it if Joel got a US job. Or we found a house. Or the right opportunity came up.
None of these things happened. Six weeks before the deadline, we decided to do it anyway.
That’s right, the long ago plan has been enacted, and we now live an hour and a half south of Vancouver in Bellingham, WA — a place we first talked about moving about a decade ago.
We’ve been asked dozens of times in the past year why we moved here. And there is no single or even primary answer. It’s some shifting combination of the following factors:
- Housing: We had few prospects of living in a three-bedroom above ground in Vancouver. Housing is expensive in Bellingham, discouragingly so, but it is still significantly more attainable than Vancouver.
- Family: We live the same distance away from Joel’s extended family (just coming from the opposite direction), and my family is an hour and a half closer and border-free, making trips to see them much simpler.
- Immigration: Getting a green card for Joel was such a long process. We felt that if we didn’t move this time, we probably wouldn’t want to go through the effort again. But because we moved, in a few years we will all have dual citizenship, meaning we can move back and forth between both countries if we so desire.
- We wanted to live here: We considered moving out into the Metro Vancouver suburban sprawl, but our hearts have belonged to this sweet little city for a long time. We wanted to honour the years of wanting to try it out. So here we are, trying it out.
A couple things that didn’t influence our move:
- Saving money: Moving is expensive, and moving to a stronger currency than the one all your cash is in is…painful. Also, while stuff-in-general is slightly cheaper in the US, many things in Canada are subsidized or socially supported that are not here, particularly daycare and health care. We are hoping the financial components pay off in the long run (by earning US income, entering the housing market, etc), but initially, the move has not been cost effective.
- Work: We ended up moving without a full-time job for Joel (although he did pick up some shift work), which meant for three months we primarily lived on my Canadian freelance income. And I generally work a little less than full-time due to children, so being the breadwinner was stressful.
- Family: Yes, this was in the “why we moved” column too, but truthfully, our relationships to our extended families are essentially the same — except that mine is now deeply tired of me complaining about American bureaucracy and how there are too many options in the grocery stores.
Regardless of the reasons, the decision set off what was easily the most insane six-week period of our lives. Moving internationally adds a complicated layer to an already stressful situation. Pack your bags — but label and itemize everything so you can declare it at the border. Purge your stuff — including any spices that might have seafood in them (one of the many eye-roll-worthy customs rules). Don’t just drive your car, import it (that took six months). Don’t just move your houseplants, get a special agricultural officer to come to your house and inspect them (worth it for our beloved ficus we bought the first year we were married). Also, figure out a new health system and relocate your business and oh, your kids’ immunizations aren’t quite aligned with state regulations…(audio fades into the background).
It was a lot.
On top of that, when we moved, I entered a deep period of mourning. I know the word for it was grief, but I didn’t know about the random crying and crippling indecision that came along with it. The truth is, while the housing situation was challenging, we loved so much of our life in Vancouver. As an immigrant, I also have that special kind of love for Canada that comes with adopting a country: a gratitude for what it’s given you, which in my case, felt like a lot.
For about three months, I felt completely disjointed, unsure of who I was or why we were here. Without that kernel of purpose — that straightforward answer to the question “why did you move?” — every inconvenience felt unnecessary, every decision random.
But one year later, we know we made the right choice.
On the housing front, I cannot overemphasize the benefit of living above ground. We moved into a lovely, two-bedroom townhouse built in 2020. It is likely the newest place we will ever call home. We have a garage, a small yard, and kind neighbors. We have 10-foot ceilings that made our first winter here considerably less difficult than the previous six. The extra breathing room means I can wait an extra day to unpack a bag without going into a tailspin, because it’s not just sitting there in my office/entryway/living room/storage unit. The positive effect of regular sunlight and full-sized windows is unmistakable.
We appreciate the slower pace and more intimate proximity of life in a smaller city. Very few places are crowded, and everyone we’ve met lives less than a 10 minute drive away. We spent our summer going to near-empty beaches within the city limit and biking on the many, many (so many) pump tracks. Recently, we hung out with Joel’s brother and family at a brewery — a very Bellingham thing, to let kids run around breweries, yet another example of the city’s community-mindedness. On the way home, I said to Joel: “I think I love it here.” The fog of my grief had finally lifted.
Yet it’s not without trade-offs. Our old neighborhood was walkable, with a park and school less than five minutes away by foot, shops and bakeries nearby, and filled with hobby gardeners and mature, well-tended urban trees. We now live on a busy (and loud) highway that is deeply unpleasant to be near. Our kids’ school is five minutes by car but in a completely different neighborhood. It’s much harder to live our hoped-for one-car life in a less-urban area, and more of an uphill battle to make healthy decisions about food, physical activity, and sustainability.
You can’t have it all when it comes to housing: I’m learning to accept this.
Housing is the reason I started this series, and when it comes to housing, we’ve gained a significant upgrade by moving to Bellingham. But that doesn’t mean all our problems are solved. Eventually, because we have a boy and a girl, we’ll need to give them separate bedrooms. (I understand this isn’t an expectation in every culture, but it’s important to us in their tween and teen years.) Right now, I’m not sure what that path to a three-bedroom dwelling looks like.
Our family is led by two well-educated, professional-class people. Each of us has been in the workforce for over 15 years, and done well in our careers. Joel turns 40 in two months. We had the discretionary funds to go through an expensive immigration process that greatly expanded our housing options. And yet we still aren’t sure what our housing future holds. What about the many, many families with less earning potential or flexibility than us? Where will they live?
I know one thing for sure, and that I’ve said before: basement suites are not the answer for those families. The mental health cost alone of living underground has only become clear to me since we moved. We need affordable and appropriately sized rentals, we need policies that address the roots of the housing crisis, we need parliaments and legislatures — which are staffed almost exclusively by people with either the wealth or age not to worry about housing — to take the housing crisis seriously. We need new levels of intentional design in our communities so that quality of life issues — like living near a school if you so choose, safe playgrounds for young children, or full-sized windows — are not considered luxuries but basic components of adequate housing and a healthy, egalitarian society. We need to support families facing the paradox that you often need more bedrooms when your income is stretched the most by feeding and clothing more humans, paying for childcare, or living on one income. We need homeowners to be willing to think beyond simply their own property taxes to enact changes that benefit everyone in the community.
Just yesterday, my daughter was playing with the wand on our blinds, and I reminded her, as I often do, that the house is not a toy. I added, for good measure, “This is our home, but it’s not our house.” She was, rightly, confused.
What I meant was, we don’t own this place. But, just like the basement, for now it is our home, and a great one at that. We are still a little housing uncertain, but home secure. Not everyone can say that — and I pray our move never makes us forget everything we learned from basement living. For today, we have a safe and adequate place to live good, full, purposeful lives. Thankfully, that life is a little bit brighter than it was before.
***
This is a bonus instalment of a six-part series about living underground in Vancouver, BC.
- Part 1: Life in a basement suite: an introduction
- Part 2: What you might find when rental hunting in Vancouver, 2016
- Part 3: Are basement suites good enough for Canadian families?
- Part 4: Seven tips for living well in a small space
- Part 5: The beauty of the basement
- Part 6: “Why don’t you just move?”
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