(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice – financialfairnessforsingles.ca).
We have talked many times in the past about how singles are being forced out of the housing market. Crises such as the Covid crisis further amplifies this issue.
Regardless of whether singles are in their younger years or seniors they are being forced into smaller and more expensive housing both from a rental and a purchasing perspective (affordable-housing-discrimination-for-singles-perpetuated-by-misinformation-and-lack-of-knowledge).
As children, social service agency rules generally dictate that when they reach a certain age they should have their own bedrooms. When these same children reach the age of majority formulas such as living wage formulas generally imply that singles only need studio apartments without a separate bedroom.
Apartments and condos for singles are becoming smaller in size, some with only bar fridges and microwaves with no laundry facilities or storage space. There is little doubt that during crises such as the Covid crisis singles will experience claustrophobia and restricted space especially if they are forced to work from home in these spaces.
As seniors the Covid crisis further amplifies how crowded Canadian nursing home spaces increased the number of senior deaths as outlined in article “Hundreds of COVID-19 deaths could have been prevented by eliminating four-person nursing-home rooms: study” (multi-bed-rooms-in-nursing-homes-could-have-saved-many-lives-study)
As stated: ‘The study by University of Toronto, McMaster University and Public Health Ontario scientists, found a clear association between the degree of crowding in homes — how many people share a room and lavatory — and the virus’s spread. Residents of the most tightly packed facilities were twice as likely to get infected and to die as those in the least-crowded homes, concluded their paper. And yet, one in four long-term-care residents were in four-bed rooms when the pandemic hit, they say.’ ‘COVID-19’s disastrous toll on nursing homes has been the central story of the pandemic in Canada, accounting for about 80 per cent of the country’s 8,500 deaths.’
Some standards have been introduced that state new facilities should only have no more than two people per room.
The irony of the above is that while it is quite acceptable for couples to share a room, singles would still be forced to have a roommate even when they have for much of their lives always lived by themselves and do not wish to have a roommate. As stated in the article, ‘past surveys indicate that 80 per cent of residents would choose to have a private room over a shared one’. Senior singles are often forced to pay more per person than coupled persons, but singles only have one income.
CONCLUSION
It is high time that families, politicians and governments realize that singles are part of the family and deserve to live in the same reasonable housing spaces as the married and their children expect to live in. Singles regardless of where they are in their life cycle should not always be the ‘losers’ in the setting of housing standards. They should not be forced to have roommates when they don’t want roommates and their spaces should be of a reasonable size. Anything less is a violation of the civil rights and family values for singles.
(These thoughts are purely the blunt, no nonsense personal opinions of the author about financial fairness and discrimination and are not intended to provide personal or financial advice – financialfairnessforsingles.ca).
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