It feels deeply ironic to be a building-trades worker during a housing crisis. I build homes—condos more specifically—for other people, but I cannot afford a decent place to live myself. I’ve even worked on building a social housing tower, brand-new, and high quality. I do not qualify for it because I make too much money, but I also don’t make enough to afford a clean, nice, market rate apartment. According to recent data, homeownership costs in Toronto, where I live, remain high, with median households needing 77 percent of their income to cover home expenses. That doesn’t leave much to live on, and for me as a single parent it isn’t easy to get a roommate or house-share.

One of the major issues in the construction trades is the severe instability. During the last half of the 20th century there was some acknowledgement of that precariousness in the form of higher hourly wages; however, our wages have been losing ground compared to other professions for the past few decades. The old guys say to prepare to be out of work for more than a year at some point in your career. It’s not unusual to be sitting at home for months or weeks on end—my union’s hiring hall has a six-month out-of-work list right now. Even when times are good it isn’t unusual to be sitting at home, because your contractor or your union doesn’t have work, but any other employer in the industry will also be unstable. And with rents creeping up so high, it gets very difficult to build up the cushion you need to get through the inevitable downtime and still be able to stay housed, especially if there ends up being a real recession affecting housing starts.

With housing, there is a generation gap. Even here in Toronto, people who went into the trades as teens or straight out of high school back in the 1980s or 90s are doing OK housing-wise, by and large. They were able to buy a house before the housing prices skyrocketed. The rest of us—the millennials and xenials, those going into trades work a little older, or immigrants—we are caught in a bind. We have the skills to build and maintain and repair housing but we can’t afford even the most dilapidated fixer-upper. We can stay in the city and often have to live in substandard or overcrowded housing as I have—a rental or a tiny condo. Or, some of us can buy a house farther and farther from the city resulting in longer and longer commutes, especially as gridlock takes hold of the city. One can also relocate to somewhere more rural and try to work there, but it can be hard to build up a clientele when one doesn’t have roots in the local community. Most of the jobs are either in the big cities or in extractive industries (the latter also highly unstable).

The different choices people make to survive in an overpriced housing situation wind up pitting workers against each other. People who live in the city want to be able to take public transit to work, but the subways don’t start running until about six in the morning, making it dicey to be on time for the six-thirty or seven o’clock start which is common in the industry. The first train in the morning is packed with construction workers and cleaners who are on the verge of being late for work. Or you can bike; provided you are on a site for a few weeks you can leave your tools at work in the lockup. But you can get sent anywhere to work without regard for where you live and how far you’ll have to travel, so a lot of downtown construction workers need to be able to pay for a car and parking spot in case they are sent to the inner suburbs or even out to Hamilton. And of course if you own your own construction business or do repairs or service work, you’re likely to need a service truck or a van, despite the heroic efforts of a few individual tradespeople to go bike-only.

On the other hand, people who live outside the city want to minimize their commute times. They sometimes spend up to five hours a day in traffic, and people are moving farther and farther out to obtain affordable housing, as far and Brantford or Peterborough or Trenton. So to beat the traffic, they generally want to start and end the workday as early as possible, which creates pressure for earlier and earlier start times. I once worked with a drywall crew from Sutton, Ontario that started work at four in the morning. People who live outside the city think (without evidence) that bike lanes are slowing down their commute. Since the union and companies dispatch people without regard to where they live, some workers end up crossing the entire Greater Toronto Area to get to work. My union has a day rate compensation for working downtown regardless of how you get there—a sensible policy that saves parking spaces and encourages transit use and carpooling. But other construction unions only compensate you if you show parking receipts.

And if you rent, which is your only option if you don’t have parents to help you with a down payment, the cost savings for moving out of the city don’t add up. While houses are significantly cheaper in the suburbs and beyond, there is less available rental housing stock, so rent does not decrease by as much as you’d expect. When you tally the additional costs of gas, and wear and tear on a car, you’re usually no further ahead. And if you have small children, as I do, time spent commuting is time not spent with your kids, which sucks, and also usually costs money for some kind of childcare. So it makes sense to live downtown, and the dense neighbourhoods help me create community, which can also help provide childcare. Plus, personally, I love living downtown. But I shouldn’t have to live in substandard housing while building and repairing homes for others.

Everyone deserves housing and a decent quality of life, but there is a major paradox when the people who build the housing don’t make enough to live in it. The irony of being a construction worker in a housing crisis is not lost on me or my co-workers. In my case, my current place is in a great location, but it is literally falling apart. I’ve lived in worse places than this, and better, but it’s been a long time since we’ve had truly secure housing. Working in a skilled trade is supposed to provide a good life, but for a lot of us, that’s no longer a sure thing.

Megan Kinch is a union electrician and freelance writer living in Toronto. You can find her on X at @meganysta.