Surprisingly, nowadays given the price of the housing market, condo living can be much cheaper than detached-house living, no matter how luxurious the condo looks -- to a certain point. Certainly you do sacrifice on size, but you have major time savings (less upkeep, less travel), no car costs, etc. A percentage (not all, but many) actually stop wanting to drive once they live in a condo.
In fact....
cars are collecting dust [photos] at this Toronto condo....
And
many condos have less parking spots than dwelling units.
Telling quotes:
...“If we couldn’t sell a unit without providing a parking spot, then we wouldn’t be selling those units. The proof is in the pudding – we sold 270 units without parking in nine days. That’s a very telling story.”
...“in some cases condo developers have been left holding the bag with empty parking spots and have applied to turn the stalls into commercial parking.”
Mathing it out, owing a $400K detached house in Hamilton versus a $600K condo in downtown Toronto, you have less than 1/3rd the space but depending on the lifestyle you choose (going car-free thanks to central location) -- you apparently may actually end up paying less total bills per month (including the mortgage and monthly condo fees) when eliminating a lot of transportation expenses of various kinds, and eliminating the upkeep costs an owned house has, amongst other expenses.
But many starter condo units (studios) are available for just $300K that's steps away from transit! Now, you're paying only $1208.16/month mortgage (BMO, 25 year, 2.49% fixed 5yr, $30K downpay). Even if you have less than steller credit and need to downpay less, it's still $1,378.17/month (BMO, 25 year, 3.2% fixed 5yr, $15K downpay). And that's a spanking-new newbuild condo, sometimes with
Bell Gigabit Fiber FTTH. Yes, it'd be small -- but many students pay that much for a dorm-sized unit in some parts of Toronto! But you do often get other amenities in the same building (e.g. a gym, a pool). Pay a little more, you get more space, an extra bedroom, etc.
Hop further out (sometimes much further), and you actually see studios in the lower-to-mid $200K range that's still within 1.5km / 15 minute walk of high-order transit (express bus, streetcar, subway, 2-way GO train). The sub-$1000/month mortgage appears! Newbuild too. You will quickly get tempted to the 1-bedrooms though to get a separate bedroom, as that's only a few hundred per month extra.
Even today, "along the corridor axis" (U of Waterloo, snaking along the main corridor to downtown Waterloo and downtown Kitchener) it is now slightly easier to go car-free in Kitchener-Waterloo than it is in the City of Hamilton (ugh), with all the great new express bus routes with actual transit-priority
that totally obliterates that toy that TTC has (Kitchener-Waterloo ripped a slow 50 minute bus down to just ~26-28 minutes with the installation of transit priority signalling) and the LRT isn't even complete yet!
(...It's still almost mandatory to own a car in Hamilton, but this perception is slowly changing, and the Hamilton LRT will help a great deal on this. Now when you buy a $300K studio or a $400K 1-bedroom instead, and forgo a lot of other expenses, you can get a cheaper lifestyle (in terms of monthly bills) than home ownership...)
In fact, some people buy a condo
because they cannot afford to buy a car. A studio condo only requires a mortgage that is barely over $1000/month at current interest rates. That's sometimes cheaper than renting! And you get pretty much all the money back when you sell. Condos may not appreciate in value as much as a house, but the right condo purchase can be far more favorable mathematically than renting.
the reason I could afford to live in a modern condo was specifically because I didn't own a car.
I am a homeowner, but have also lived in condos (at the time, I was car-free too) --
one of those gleaming glass towers with gym, pool, party room, BBQ deck, shared big screen home theater room -- so I understand the lifestyle and how the bills are different.
Everyone living in a modern condo can afford a car.
Utter garbage. Bilge ballast. Read the above.
--> some people buy a condo because they cannot afford to buy a car. <--