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“I don’t know if I should unpack my life or just wait to be kicked out,” Gallant says, two weeks before receiving an eviction notice. His landlord is selling the home.

He works at a shop printing T-shirts and hoodies, and to pay the first month’s rent of $1,200 at his current house, he had to borrow money from his mother, who formerly worked at a dollar store, and his stepfather, who works part-time at a bingo hall.

In a rental market given over to bidding wars, Gallant says he only managed to get the unit because the landlord thought his son, Logan, 3, was cute.

He has two months to find another unit, although he plans to appeal the eviction to the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission. He envies his friends who live in cheaper cities in New Brunswick.

“I would love to leave this island,” he says.

Mainlanders might suspect P.E.I. is a province that does not change, as if it had not just elected the country’s strongest Green Party to official opposition status. The Island is still a place where the new premier and opposition leader hugged it out after April’s election — an election in which one riding had two candidates with the same name, Matthew MacKay versus Matthew MacKay.

But it is changing with pace and without foresight. Islanders are repatriating after living out West, newcomers are responding to new policies designed to attract them and rural seniors are moving downtown to be closer to doctors.

We’re a small city with big-city problems

As of last fall, the vacancy rate in Charlottetown is 0.2 per cent, the lowest ever recorded in the city by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. This rate compares to a 1.1 per cent vacancy rate in Toronto. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Charlottetown is $921, and the median price of a single detached home is approximately $285,000, an 18 per cent increase from last year. In the Greater Toronto Area, tenants have faced a housing shortage for more than a decade, but now the crisis of the 905 has entered the 902.