A news story went viral this week about a young Toronto family living the life of Cheech and Chong against their will.

According to the CBC, Toronto condo resident Paul Bradshaw, along with his wife and 7-year-old son, have had to put up with pot smoke seeping into their condo from their next-door neighbour’s unit for nearly five years. Bradshaw told the CBC the smoke seeps into the family’s condo unit not only through the front door, but also through windows and electrical sockets, and into his kid’s room.

“It wakes him up from a dead sleep,” Bradshaw said in an interview with the national broadcaster. “We have an air purifier but it has very little effect. It’s potent. It hits you.”

Unfortunately, little can be done to legally stop the stoner next door. Repairs to the condo unit’s walls haven’t prevented smoke from seeping into Bradshaw’s son’s room. The Smoke-Free Ontario Act prohibits smoking in common areas of condominiums, but not in individual units themselves. (Condos can create rules around smoking in individual units, but according to the CBC, Bradshaw’s has not.)

A terminal cynic might suggest, by way of consolation for the Bradshaws, that their son’s early exposure to pot smoke, as a companion bedtime ritual to brushing his teeth and putting on his pyjamas, might immunize him against marijuana’s cool factor. When he gets to high school and somebody passes him a joint, he can honestly say, “no thanks, I had my fill in the second grade.”

Joking aside, the Bradshaws’ dilemma brings to mind two major issues facing our city.

The first is the nation-wide legalization of marijuana. We are now less than a year away from legal pot, and it’s not unlikely, come July 1, 2018, that people who smoke up in their apartments may feel more entitled when neighbours complain about the telltale odour wafting in from next door. Why not? Legalization will validate their pot use and erode the social stigma around it.

But the Bradshaws’ problem impinges on an issue that’s far more mainstream than the legalization of marijuana: affordable housing.

Moving forward, I wouldn’t be surprised if complaints like Paul Bradshaw’s become more commonplace precisely because we’re facing an affordable housing crisis.

As things stand now, many young families can’t afford to buy homes, so they rent living accommodation instead. This means the apartments or condos in which they partied their twenties away now have to serve as starter family homes, especially if they choose to have kids. This would be OK (albeit a little cramped) if everyone in the city was the same age, or matured at the same rate, but obviously this isn’t the case.

Which means that many couples with new babies who can’t find afford to move, will end up staying put in downtown rental buildings, where few people go to bed before 10 o’clock, and where it isn’t uncommon for some residents to drink and crank up Spotify playlists with titles like “Songs for Drunk White Girls” on a Tuesday night. And, of course, smoke marijuana.

My wife and I are in this situation right now.

We live in a condo building that’s relatively young (most residents appear to be between 25 and 40). We moved into our unit when we were 24 and received regular noise complaints in response to our own weeknight partying. Now, on the cusp of 30, we’re the ones making the noise complaints.

Where our smoke used to seep out into the hallway, now our younger neighbour’s does. This may simply be the great circle of urban life, but it’s bound to become greater and more circular as the accelerating lack of affordable housing suited to families, and the increasing number of urban millennials with young children collide.

The question is, what can those of us who’d like to lead a quiet family life (in a city where only the rich can afford houses) do about it?

I propose a Toronto Condo Party Registry. Not unlike the Bed Bug registry, an online database of Toronto apartment buildings and hotels potentially infected with bed bugs, the Party Registry would inform Torontonians about apartment and condo buildings prone to weeknight bacchanals.

What’s more, it would alert you to the ambience of revelry specific to the rental accommodation being considered, from the type of tunes blasting within its walls, to the substances consumed.

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If you were looking at a building close to the financial district, for instance, the registry might let you know you’d better get used to the smell of stale beer, discarded bounce tubes, and the eternal bro chant “Ole! Ole! Ole!”

If you were looking at a building in the hipper west, the registry might warn you about the e-cigarette smoke hazard. And if you were moving north, Avenue Road-ish say, you’d be alerted to the possibility of being woken up in the middle of the night by the voice of Mariska Hargitay of Law and Order SVU, the result of an elderly neighbour who’d left the TV on again at maximum volume, because they’re asleep, hard of hearing, or worse.

Marijuana to Mariska — as a renter and/or new parent, all you can do is to pick your poison.