A family that rents in Vancouver because they want to. Meet the Bancrofts.

People are always surprised when we tell them we rent our house in Vancouver. But to us, it makes a lot of sense. Instead of arguing over whose turn it is to mow the lawn, my husband and I can spend our weekends enjoying a refreshing glass of rosé in a sunny beautifully maintained backyard. And while our friends spend hours in their cars ferrying kids back and forth to school and activities, our kids can walk to school or the community centre a few blocks away. Being so close to the Canada Line, we barely drive downtown. Hence the glass of rosé.

This has been our reality for the last nine years, since we sold our house near Douglas Park and moved into a rental on a double-wide lot in leafy First Shaughnessy. When I go for a run I’m immediately surrounded by Great Gatsby-esque homes for eye candy. I wonder what’s on the other side of the 10-foot hedges—a grass tennis court? A koi pond and pagoda? One time I decided to count the rhododendrons in bloom along my usual route but stopped when I passed 200.

Our rental house is from the 1920s, and came with a farmhouse-style dining room table so large it must have been built in place. Imagine that—a separate dining room! It has tons of light from beautiful paned windows, and every member of the family has their own room with a walk-in closet. Renting can be a big upgrade in this city, it can allow you to live where you want to, not where you can afford to, and in a larger footprint.

A rental can have its quirks of course, as did this one. Before us, it housed a group of 10 or 12 roommates from around the world, each with their own phone line. The Shaw technician said he’d never seen anything like it. Apparently, they all liked the colour blue and painted their personal spaces accordingly. Unfortunately, they all liked a different shade of blue, so we spent a month painting almost everything back to white. The kitchen, being from the ’20s, is small. But that’s fine with us and we entertain in the backyard around the pizza oven we installed on the driveway. My husband, who does most of the cooking, likes that the kitchen is small so he’s not running around like some contestant on Chopped from the fridge to the ice-cream maker 10 metres away.

A few years ago our family took a sabbatical year to Paris (another advantage of not being chained to a Vancouver-sized mortgage). We sublet our home, and found a rental apartment in the 8th Arrondissement, close to a beautiful park and the international schools. In Paris, just about everyone rents. Three-bedroom “family apartments” as they are called are so coveted, people rent them for life, and even pass them down to their kids. They might own something in the countryside, but there is no question of owning right in the city. We feel a little like this about Vancouver.

We are also huge proponents of urban density, and when a home builder proposed a townhouse project in our neighbourhood, we got excited. Maybe we could stay in the neighbourhood and rent something brand new! But City Council voted it down, citing the rents too expensive (for the record it would have been a substantial rent decrease for us). So for now, we’ve signed another two-year lease and are busy planting our herb pots and chilling the rosé. — Sarah Bancroft @thesarahfile

Photos: Janis Nicolay (house) and Candace Meyer (portrait).