A realtor I’ve known and liked for years called me and said a tad too brazenly: “You two don’t need all that space. You should be moving on.”

I jokingly told her to get a court order.

But the jokes are few and far between. Living in an astronomically valued downtown house — one that my family has thrived in for three decades — has an uneasy fin de siècle feel to it these days.

Part of it is our stage of life — two kids grown and gone.

But there’s also a housing shortage amid forecasts that the cost of existing homes will rise around 25 per cent this year, and that ever ominous prospect of the “bubble bursting.” (Idea for real estate sales campaign: “Where do YOU want to be when the bubble bursts?”)

Read more: ‘Salon’ to tackle Toronto housing crisis

We have the rueful recognition that the children we raised to adulthood in a once modest neighbourhood, despite good jobs, couldn’t begin to afford to live here.

Our hood’s not modest anymore — although some houses are fairly blushing with their million-dollar price tags as prospective buyers think: “You’re kidding, right?”

There is also an acute rental shortage with many vulnerable people one pay cheque away from losing their too expensive apartments, or what is now called “precarious housing.”

The budget announcement this week of $11.2 billion over 11 years to enact a “national housing strategy” seems both necessary and beside the point: renters and buyers, even nonvulnerable ones — need a roof now. Yet part of the plan — to collect real data on how house prices get driven up-seems a good and necessary thing.

In the meantime here we sit inside that bubble, no doubt looked on as selfish boomers standing in the way of millennials getting into the housing market.

It’s not our fault. Because of a decision my husband and I made more than 30 years ago, sitting in a parked car quaking with fear at the fact that the house we had fallen in love with cost about $178,000, we are now considered rich and even rapacious.

Back then we wondered how, as two self-employed people, one of whom was pregnant, we could afford it.

We did, but the dream isn’t quite what it seems. Many boomers atypically still have hefty mortgages or credit lines attached to their houses. Home Sweet ATM.

We’ve renovated this house, tried to keep up with its many repairs, celebrated every milestone in our family’s life here.

The walls may need a paint job but they are saturated with memories. The cry of new babies in the night, that middle school party that nearly got out of hand, the wedding shower for our daughter, at which her school friends, some of them now pregnant or with babies, posed for pictures in the same living room in which as teens they had whispered their evening strategy: “Tell them you’re coming to my house.”

O house. Our children have had the privilege of knowing only one family home while growing up. When each of them walks back in, whether it’s been a week for the one in town, or months for the one away, I see sheer pleasure on their faces.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

We didn’t mean to stay this long. But we loved the family neighbourhood, and no dwelling ever did sunlight like ours. It pours in even on a cold winter morning. From my third-floor office I can sometimes see the CN Tower and my husband can hardly wait, as he does every spring, to obsess over his small garden.

In a sell-high buy-high market, in some ways we can’t afford to move. We both have offices in this house, and we use the space well.

The truth is, we’re not ready to enter what most of our friends call “the next phase.” Some have blissfully migrated to condos, others more realistically to rental apartments. One “downsized” to a larger house.

Housing hypocrisy is rampant. I have talked to friends in British Columbia who bemoaned the changes foreign investment was bringing to their leafy neighbourhoods — staggering prices, absent owners. But when they were ready, they slapped a sign on the lawn just ahead of new provincial taxes on foreign ownership, took the millions and ran. Wouldn’t you?

Housing has always been a generational and an emotional issue. According to Forbes magazine, the millennial wave of home buying is not crushed forever, just delayed. Most people start looking to buy in their early 30s. Two-thirds of millennials haven’t reached 30 yet.

Their stubborn dream is still to own a house. I grew up in a rented house so the fact that we own this house still astonishes me.

Last year a neighbour’s house sold after multiple bids. A young and growing family moved in.

I see us in them — adorable children, hard working parents devoted to their kids, stretching their wallets for daycare, themselves for stamina.

We had them over for brunch, along with another young couple who had renovated a house, and a middle-aged couple.

It felt like the street was moving in the right direction — toward the future.

It’s just still unfathomable to me that this future — in a neighbourhood once viewed as modest and mixed — now has a million dollar price tag.