He can't afford to rent an apartment. So this man secretly sleeps in an office

A man in St. John's rents office space, but he doesn't have an office job.

He's an electrician, driving from gig to gig all day. The office is where he sleeps at night, secretly, because he couldn't afford to rent an apartment anywhere in the city. For two months during the frigid Newfoundland and Labrador winter, he lived in his truck. Then, in February, he found an office listed for $450 per month.

"I'm 100 per cent doing this clandestinely," the 37-year-old told CBC News. "I basically have given up on finding anything else."

CBC News agreed not to identify the man because it would jeopardize his precarious living situation and his employment. But he is one of many people across Canada who contacted CBC News about how the cost of rent has affected them and their living situations.

Many of those people, like him, have full-time jobs.

Finding housing at all is daunting amid surging prices and decreased availability marking Canada's rental housing crisis. Demand is outpacing supply across the country, with vacancy rates reaching a new low and average rent growth increases reaching a new high, notes a January rental market report from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC).

The average asking price for rent in Canada hit an all-time high of $2,202 per month in May, according to a June report from listing website Rentals.ca.

The website looked at rents for condos, apartments and houses/townhouses, based on monthly listings from the Rentals.ca Network of Internet Listings Services.

Its data covers both the primary and secondary rental markets and includes basement apartments, rental apartments, condominium apartments, townhouses, semi-detached houses and single-detached houses.

The situation where a full-time worker still can't find an affordable rental option is becoming more common, said Annie Hodgins, executive director of the Toronto-based non-profit Canadian Centre for Housing Rights.

Ten years ago, the Canadians who called the centre's rental help line were mostly lower income or on social assistance, Hodgins said. But these days, more calls are coming in from people who are employed full time, she said.

"It really reflects how astronomically high rental housing is," Hodgins told CBC News. "It's a huge problem."

A recent CBC News analysis of more than 1,000 neighbourhoods across Canada's largest cities found that fewer than one per cent of rentals are both vacant and affordable for the majority of the country's renters.

In October 2023, across the 35 metropolitan areas CBC News analyzed, only 1,400 bachelor or one-bedroom homes were vacant and located in neighbourhoods that full-time minimum-wage workers could afford. CBC calculated affordability based on rental costs and utilities staying below 30 per cent of households' gross income, a benchmark set by the CMHC in 1986.