Yuriy’s Notebook: A Crazy Hunt for Housing

When I arrived in Vancouver in 2022 to escape the dangerous conditions in Ukraine, it seemed to me that the bulk of the city’s residents divides into two categories: landlords and tenants.

And there are far fewer of the first than of the second. Therefore, the rent is high and it is difficult to find suitable housing.

In Crimea, where I am from, there is a mild climate, a warm Black Sea and magnificent beaches. Millions of tourists have been coming to Crimea every year since the time of the Soviet Union. The result is that you can find a wide variety of housing in Crimea. And other than during the high holiday season of July and August, renting housing is not a problem. In fact, it’s quite cheap for local residents.

After I left Crimea in 2022, I spent time in western Europe waiting for my Canadian visa to come through. Even in a resort town like Cannes, France, I had little trouble finding an affordable place to rent. Depending on how long I wanted to stay, my options included many hotels or private apartments. That’s how tourists settle in, whether they want to be there for several days or months or even a year.

I figured a global tourist destination like British Columbia would be similar. In fact, Ukrainians and Russians here call the area around Kelowna and Okanagan Lake “the Canadian Crimea” for its similar weather and terrain.

Count me among the thousands of Ukrainians arriving in Canada who found ourselves shocked to learn that in Toronto, Vancouver and other places, rental units are scarcer and more expensive than in most other places in the world.

For us, as I explained last week, securing decent-paying, steady employment can be tough. I can honestly say, however, that most of us would agree that after landing in Canada, finding housing can be even harder than getting work.

Vancouver, my chosen destination, turns out to be the hardest. Competition for available rental units is so fierce that landlords can be quite picky when choosing a tenant.

I soon learned that for every ad I found on Facebook Marketplace, Kijiji or Craigslist, dozens of potential tenants were responding along with me. Most of them had lived in the city for a long time, had stable jobs and could give good references from previous landlords.

Most recent Ukrainian immigrants, however, had neither a job in Canada nor recommendations. Why would anyone choose someone like me as a tenant? And what could I do to change things?

I had to figure that out pretty fast, because even before coming to Canada I’d spent weeks looking for long-term rentals in Vancouver. I’d started out confident that my ability to communicate with people and positive attitude towards life would be enough to quickly persuade some landlord to offer me a lease for a year. At first, as I scrolled through pages of housing options on various platforms, I was the picky one. I wrote to the few that met my standards and were my ideal choices. Nobody answered me.

Next, I sent out waves of requests, answering dozens of advertisements. Some responded and invited me to an open house. But when I told them I was about to arrive in Vancouver with a Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel, or CUAET, visa, my friendly landlord correspondents tended to disappear. The nice ones politely refused me. The rest simply ignored my messages.

As I tried to calm my frustration, it became clear that I faced a difficult puzzle. If you want to find good housing, you need to be in Canada with a good job and plenty of money in your account. But how do you accomplish that without a roof over your head?

So here’s what I did. I found an Airbnb suite in a family home in a quiet corner of Surrey that briefly met my budget, even if it made public transit trips to Vancouver and other urban centres take much of a day. That became my base of operations for my first months in Canada.

Then I began asking around. How do I crack the puzzle? What do I have to do to get a permanent lease? Soon I found myself in a shadowy world, talking to real estate agents involved in illegal practices. One of them explained to me that he takes a fee of around $400 from immigrants from the former Soviet Union and in return provides a special form of assistance. I’ll keep the real name of this person to myself. Let’s call him Joe.

“You want to have as large a sum of money as possible in your bank account,” said Joe. “If you don’t have much, borrow a bunch from someone for one day. Then order a bank statement to show that you have money. The more money, the better.”

“Then smile a lot,” continued Joe, “and if the landlord asks for a reference, you can say that you came here recently, but you can confirm that you have money — and give them your bank statement. Here, a bank statement is a very significant document. No one will think that this money is not yours.”

Then Joe suggested I bluff like a poker player using someone else’s chips. “To enhance the effect, you can say that you are ready to pay in advance for a few months.”

Luckily, I didn't have to use Joe’s advice. One day I viewed an apartment I was hoping to rent. It didn’t work out. But the building managers were Russian immigrants. We got to know each other and talked for a long time about Crimea, where they vacationed many times during their student years. If it seems strange that we’d get along, really it isn’t. There are practically no disagreements between Ukrainians and Russians in Canada. Many Russians immigrated not only for economic reasons but for political ones.

Later, when an apartment became available in a building the couple managed on Commercial Drive, they persuaded the landlord to give me the lease.

Few of my fellow newcomers have been so lucky. Most of them were forced to live below ground, in a common form of housing here called the “basement suite.”

“This is a stage that you have to go through when starting life in Canada,” warned an acquaintance named Alexander, who moved to Vancouver from Odesa, Ukraine, in 2022. “You will have something to remember later,” he said.

Yes, people back home will be amazed to hear of your experience — because in Ukraine, almost no one lives in basements. Basements are for furnaces and other machinery. When I moved to Vancouver, I was surprised to learn that several of the friends I made have been renting basements for 15 years or more. They’ve adapted to their habitats. They are almost used to living in such conditions — although their favourite joke is that the scariest sound in the world is the thunder of the landlord’s children running overhead.

The federal and provincial governments did recognize the barriers Ukrainians coming here under CUAET faced when we began arriving in 2022. We didn’t qualify for standard refugee supports. But the B.C. government offered “temporary hardship assistance” for up to a year based on “need and eligibility,” which could be as much as $935 monthly for individuals and $1,770 for a family of four.

In addition, the federal government provided a single payment of $3,000 per adult and $1,500 per child aged 17 and under.

How far that money might stretch was hinted at by a March 2023 fact sheet published by the BC Refugee Resource Network. It noted that the average rent provincewide at the time was $1,432 for a one-bedroom with a vacancy rate of 1.1 per cent, $1,721 for a two-bedroom with a vacancy rate of 1.5 per cent, and $2,067 for a three-bedroom apartment with a vacancy rate of two per cent.

Many British Columbians kindly helped fill the gap — people like Bradley Gionet, who had already hosted refugees in his Chilliwack home while they got on their feet. Now he opened his home to Ukrainians and helped them with paperwork and finding more permanent settings.

By 2024, two years into the CUAET program, the number of Ukrainian arrivals to B.C. had reached 20,000. Many were connected with some 500 local families with space to share by United Way British Columbia’s United for Ukraine program. Some Ukrainian newcomers were offered a small room, others an empty house. Their typical stay, according to Archway Community Services, lasted two weeks to over three months.

“Becoming a host to a Ukrainian family or individual is a rewarding way for people to help,” explained Anna Tykhonchenko, an Archway Ukrainian settlement worker.

“Having a safe space to rest and begin processing their trauma is an important step as Ukrainians seek to integrate into their new communities,” added Tykhonchenko, who fled Ukraine herself in March 2022.

Starting this week, however, the federal government is cutting immigrant settlement funding to many B.C. service providers. Since most Ukrainians have now been here for a while, and the CUAET visa program has stopped admitting new applicants, my community may not be as directly affected as some other immigrant groups.

My feeling for a while that I wasn’t sure I’d find a place to live in my newly chosen country made me sensitive to the harsh reality faced by homeless people. Canadians often ask me whether there are many homeless people on the streets in Ukraine. In fact, there are practically no homeless people in Ukraine. Most have their own apartments, which they inherited from the times of the Soviet Union.

Under the U.S.S.R. system, the state gave free housing to workers. According to Soviet law, everyone had to have a job and everyone had to have a registered address. The state ensured both were possible. However, “for systematically engaging in vagrancy or begging,” people were sent to prison for two years.

This fact points to a tension I will be exploring in my final notebook entry next week. My time in British Columbia has caused me to think a lot about the word “freedom.”

There is no doubt that by many measures people here are freer than in the society I left behind. I certainly feel safe here to say what I please. Social norms are very relaxed compared with back home.

Still, the constant pressure to pay high bills imposes its own restrictions. And that has many Ukrainians, including me, wondering if Canada is the promised land we’d imagined.

This series is supported by funding from the Hummingbird Foundation.