KINGSTON – Finding an affordable place to live during the housing crisis in Kingston is “like the lottery,” said a man who up until Monday was facing the prospect of being homeless.

After weeks of searching, Mathew Wicksey, 27, on Monday afternoon finally found a new apartment to move into when his current lease expires at the end of April.

His new apartment came about after he posted an online appeal for help last week and he said he was optimistic about it when he sat down with The Whig-Standard to talk about the “absolute nightmare” it was looking for a place to live.

In his online posting last week, Wicksey wrote that if he couldn’t find a new apartment by May 1 he would be “buying a tent and moving to Wolfe Island.”

I’ve talked to people who have become homeless because they couldn’t find a place even though they have put first and last months rent aside,” said Wicksey, a 27-year-old barista at a cafe downtown.

“It’s a really scary feeling when you know your lease is up and you know that come this day that you need to be moving to another place and you are looking and looking and you can’t find a place whatsoever,” he said.

“You lose sleep over it.”

He means that literally, too. Finding a new apartment was an around-the-clock effort and Wicksey’s cellphone alerted him every time a new apartment listing in his price range is posted online.

“If my phone goes off at 2 o’clock in the morning, if my phone dings, I am sending a message and, fingers crossed, the person replies,” he said.

Wicksey was looking for a bachelor or one-bedroom apartment, which are among the most sought-after accommodations in the city.

In 2018, Kingston’s rental vacancy rate was a record-low 0.6 per cent, the lowest in Ontario, according to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC).

The vacancy rate for a one-bedroom apartment was 0.5 per cent and for a bachelor apartment it was was 1.2 per cent.

Housing was the common theme in almost every candidate in last year’s municipal election and Mayor Bryan Paterson pledged to create a task force to look at the issue.

City council approved the plan for the task force last month, with the addition of two members to represent tenants.

Wicksey, who grew up in Kingston and has been living with roommates for about five years, the rental housing market has deteriorated in the past year or two.

Wicksey said more housing needs to be created for people who are working to make ends meet.

“They need more affordable housing for the people who are on social assistance, people who are working for minimum wage jobs full time,” he said. “A lot of these people have to juggle jobs because they are trying to support their family so they are working two jobs and it is so expensive and the price is going up.”

According to the CMHC, only 74 rental units of all kinds were added to the city’s rental stock between 2017 and 2018, including five bachelor apartments and 10 one-bedroom apartments.

Wicksey said the apartments that were in his $900- to $1,000-a-month price range were not well maintained. Drug use and bed bugs are common problems in a lot of rental areas, he said.

“One place I lived, it was a bachelors, but it was in a run down building. There were a lot of users around. If you looked up you notice blood spots on the ceiling because there were using hard drugs,” he said.

“You know it’s bad when you know what meth smells like and you don’t even use it.”