Toronto Life magazine has a particular knack for generating social media hate-fests by documenting the luxurious predilections and pitfalls of a certain class of Torontonians: the young and the clueless, you could say.

There was Tony, the 31-year-old “big spender” whose manifesto for “generation spend” documented why he didn’t plan to buy a house and instead spent many thousands of dollars on bottle service and weekend jet-setting while living with his parents. There was the financial profile of the magazine intern/shoe salesperson whose annual income from work was $7,800 (and income from her parents was $39,500) who spent money on manicures and a downtown apartment. There was the “Almost Rich” feature on how hard it is to get by on $200,000 per year in Toronto — because after the cleaning lady, $400 a month on “creams and lotions” and $800 a month on wine, you barely have enough left to gas up the Mercedes.

Read more: Parkdale reno story inspires social media backlash

It’s the details that really get the proletarian revolutionary blood pumping. Take the most recent story, this week, detailing one couple’s Parkdale “reno from hell,” which sparked an online uproar as reported by my colleague David Hains of Metro. There’s the fact the author spent $560,000 on a crumbling Parkdale rooming house for her family to live in without looking at it first. There’s their disdainful attitude to the poor people living in it that they have to kick out. Or that she and her husband hired a toothless drifter riding by on his bicycle to act as their contractor (and paid him to go away after he almost completely collapsed the foundation). Or that they complain of having to squeeze their family into the condo they also owned during renovations. Or that they were able to rely on a six-figure loan from a family friend to get it all done. The icing on the cake: another magazine feature this spring by the same author details how they bought an island cottage on their line of credit during the same period, and mentions they also own land in Mexico.

So, here’s the thing, obviously: it sounds like they had some self-inflicted rough patches in their renovation project. But what’s described here as “hell” sounds a lot like living the high life to most of us. Like so many so-called problems Toronto Life profile subjects raise, this seems to be a case of “been up so long it looks like down to me.”

And amid the avalanche of snark she’s been buried under since it was published, the author of the piece seems to appreciate that. “My article was meant to be about a renovation and our fairly dramatic mistakes along the way. I have listened to the feedback. I understand why the story and my insensitive descriptions triggered anger around real issues of affordable housing, homelessness and more,” writer Catherine Jheon wrote to Hains. “I’m going to take some time to reflect on everything that has happened.”

I roll my eyes with the best of them. I enjoy sneering at insensitive obliviousness. Look at those details and just try to keep your eyebrows level.

But I also think, let he who has not evicted low-income tenants from a slummy apartment house to undertake a barely competent renovation to make a home for his family cast the first stone countertop. Like many others in this city, I have done exactly that — with less dramatics than Jheon, and less of a financial cushion to fall back on. But still. It’s a common thing — increasingly common in this city.

And that is of course the real problem, the real source of anger and resentment about a story like this: the context. The “real issues of affordable housing, homelessness and more” that Jheon mentions.

Let’s take a look at some recent stories — many right there in the same neighourhood as that Toronto Life reno — that have generated rather less of an uproar.

Rooming houses like the one the couple in the story bought have traditionally made up a big percentage of the affordable housing stock in Parkdale — a rare very low end of the market available for people who are very hard to house. But a study from the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust last month shows they’re an increasingly endangered species. In the past decade, they found, 28 rooming houses have been converted to single-family homes, leaving rooms for 347 fewer people. In the years to come they believe 59 more such houses, home to 818 people, are at “imminent risk” of being lost.

The City of Toronto is in the midst of studying its rules around rooming houses, with an eye to making them legal in more places across the city, and to upgrading the living standards of the ones that already exist. But in Parkdale, one of the few places they’ve thrived, the market is driving towards eliminating them.

And there are few other places to take up the slack they leave. The tenants of lower-rent market apartments in Parkdale towers owned by Metcap Living Management Inc. are in the midst of a “rent strike,” demanding both repairs to their units and an end to above-guideline rent increases the landlord is justifying by citing capital repair costs mounting on aging buildings. The units, Vic Natola of Parkdale Community Legal Services told the Star when the strike kicked off, are a “disaster,” and the rent increases are “displacing an entire neighbourhood in the name of profit.”

Meanwhile, public housing across the city and in Parkdale is falling apart. Documents reported on by the Star late last month show that every Toronto Community Housing project in Parkdale — over 1,200 units in all — is expected to be in “poor” or “critical” condition by 2021.

You want to talk about a “reno from hell” situation, look at the affordable rental housing options in Toronto. Half of public housing units across the city will be in a “critical” condition of deterioration within five years — if they don’t get shuttered first. Meanwhile a new report from the Wellesley Institute says the 170,000 apartment tower rental units in the inner suburbs, “the main form of relatively moderate-rent housing available for low- and modest-income families,” is threatened by “increasing disrepair and affordability problems.” Half of highrise tenants in high-poverty neighbourhood buildings reported poor building conditions, according to one study cited by the Wellesley report.

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That affordable places for our poorest residents to live — in houses, in private rental buildings, in public housing — are either disappearing or falling apart is a crisis that’s been unfolding before our eyes in slow motion. Those details are ones more disturbing than any wine budget reported by Toronto Life.