By Jim Hagarty
2017
I live in a small, Canadian city, population about 35,000, a two-hour drive from the metropolis that is Toronto. Stratford, Ontario, has been around a long time, in Canadian terms anyway, considering the whole area it sits on was so thickly covered in tall trees 200 years ago that the sun, the wind and even the snow had a hard time making it down to the forest floor.
Toronto has been around even longer than Stratford and I always think of it as a few hundred Stratfords all shoved together into a big hot mess. I have family there. They love it. I love that I live in the one Stratford that sits all by itself out in the middle of nowhere. In fact, walking or driving, I can be out into the countryside that surrounds my town in only a few minutes. And yet, the place is just big enough that its citizens can still cling to a little bit of anonymity if we want to.
But it seems Toronto has discovered Stratford, or at least, some residents of it have. Because if you have the nerve to stick a For Sale sign on your front lawn, a city slicker from Trawna will scoop that sucker up faster than a half-price loaf of bread at Wal-Mart.
My neighbour bought a little bungalow just up the street from me about 35 years ago, or even a few years before that, I forget. He paid just over $20,000 for it, raised his family in it and fixed it up considerably in the intervening decades. A year ago, he sold it for about $250,000, though I never heard the final, precise figure. The couple who bought it have spent the last 12 months fixing it up even more and last week, put it on the market again, this time for $349,000. That seemed to be a bit of a stretch but news is that already a couple of potential buyers from Toronto are fighting over the place at that asking price. In fact, there have been a few instances recently where the sellers in Stratford have gotten more than they have asked for.
This has caused a veritable wave of my neighbours (and me) to take to our front lawns and between dancing heartily up and down waving streamers with delight, we have stopped to consider the possible meaning of all this to our own humble abodes and to our financial futures.
Of course, the downside of all this is that, with the homes in town gaining in value seemingly by the minute, a local homeowner cashing in on all this new-found motherlode, could probably not then turn around and buy another home in Stratford, without choosing to live in one that is just barely staying three steps ahead of the bulldozer.
I knew of a farmer many years ago, though not as many as you might think, who sold his farm for $19,000, a pretty good price at the time, and who made plans to move to town and buy a house. However, the man who bought his farm had no use for the farmhouse so he made the very generous gesture of offering to let the old farmer continue to live in his house for as long as he liked. Whether or not there was any rent involved, I can’t say, but I was always under the impression the man was allowed to live there for free, which he did for a few years, happy to be able to linger on among his memories for a while.
Finally, the farmer decided to make the move to town and buy that dream house. However, by that time, his $19,000, which would have bought him a nice little place when he first sold his farm, wouldn’t even come close.
I bought my bungalow just down the street from my neighbour 32 years ago for $59,500. I had bought it from a guy who paid $33,000 for it two years earlier.
I was one of the idiots dancing a jig with streamers outside yesterday, never realizing till then just how much I love the people from Trawna.
But all the while, I nervously remember the $19,000 farmer.
And I wonder what became of him.
