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Like a couple of idiots, my boyfriend and I are trying to buy a house in Toronto.

We are extraordinarily fortunate: both university educated, employed full time, totally debt-free and we have a reasonably sized down payment. We are also just naive enough to still believe any of that matters in a city where property values rose 16.8 per cent in June over the same period last year.

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The ferocity of Toronto’s preposterous housing market means that even if we decided to live in our parents’ basement for a year or two — thus stockpiling the money we would otherwise spend on rent and associated expenses — our savings would only barely outpace the rate at which the average Toronto home would increase in value over that time. (Plus, we’d be living in our parents’ basement, which is one millennial-point short of going back to school for a master’s in art history.)

We could instead opt to buy a 750-square-foot box in the sky — one with unpredictable maintenance fees, an unnecessarily lavish and wholly useless lobby, a collection of perpetually “under maintenance” amenities and the gentle hum of our neighbours’ arguments singing us to sleep each night, but as a long-term investment, I’m not convinced it’s the right one. Condos are not increasing in value at nearly the same rate as houses, especially when it comes to older condos, which don’t seem to appeal to my kind in the same way as do contemporarily glass-and-steel structures. Eventually, though, those glass-and-steel structures will fall out of favour too, and it’s hard to predict what exactly will happen to property values then.