Bathed In Luxury. This is the tagline of a new condominium residence and hotel under construction on Bloor Street East. I struggle with the word luxury. I struggle with the way it’s used. In the context of marketing which, in this case, means marketing real estate, the word luxury is deployed in a peculiar way. The marketing people who wrote this tagline toy with my desire to live in luxury knowing that I perceive luxury as somehow instrumental in attaining personal happiness. After all, isn’t that what I want? To be happy?
Desire is a scab. When I pick at that insistent feeling, what I draw to the surface, red and raw, is anxiety. Satisfying desire means quelling anxiety. I think of the feelings I had as a teenager with a crush, that strange alchemy of both desire and angst. I want her. Will she even notice me? She is my world. She could crush me like a bug. The desire for luxury is likewise angst-filled: I want luxury not simply to have it, but to stave off anxieties about not having enough. I want nice things, but worry about my creditors. I want to feel secure, but I’m afraid I’ll lose everything. Maybe worst of all, I want to project success, but I’m terrified of the shame I would feel if all I could present to my peers was failure. If only I owned a luxury condominium unit.
If I keep picking at that scab, I draw blood. In our cut-throat capitalist economy, built on its own version of Darwinism, my success never stands alone; it comes at the expense of someone else. Although I’d rather not acknowledge it, my luxury means someone else’s poverty. I don’t know if there’s a causal connection between the two. I’m no economist. I suspect there is a causal connection, but I can’t say for certain. What I can say for certain is that there is a semantic connection. I can’t know what luxury means, the way it tastes, the way it makes me feel, the way it wraps me in comfort, unless I have poverty close at hand as a reference. After all, if everyone was bathed in luxury, it wouldn’t be luxury any more. So give me poverty. Without poverty, I can never know satisfaction.
This new construction project finds itself in an odd location. It calls itself The Rosedale but technically the neighbourhood of Rosedale begins on the other side of the street, the side where I was standing when I made this photograph. To my back, on the far side of Rosedale Valley Road, lies one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in the country. In front of me, inside the camera’s frame, not so much. People beg on the street corners. At least once a day, somebody in distress starts yelling about things that make no sense to anybody else. Earlier in the year, the city had to close the Sherbourne Street Bridge for a structural assessment because homeless people lit a fire underneath it.
By comparison to these things, what does luxury look like? According to the builder’s web site, luxury begins at 307 square feet. Before Covid-19, typical condo real estate in these parts was going for $1000 per square foot. So you do the math.