If you're wondering how much rent used to be in Ontario, well, you're in luck. Someone in Kingston found an old newspaper from 1972 that shows just how much rent used to cost for some apartments back in the day.
Reddit user sppdcap shared a photo of the vintage paper that they found on r/KingstonOntario (interestingly they're not the first person recently to find ancient newspapers from earlier on in Ontario's history.)
"I found it November 13 when I was putting some Halloween stuff in the attic," the Reddit user shared with Narcity. "It was just sitting there on the attic insulation."
Even with the crumpled up rips on the newspaper clipping, the '70s paper still appears to reveal a lot about what the rental market was like for Kingston then.
All of the (readable) ads give a short detailed description of what kind of unit it is, where it's located, what amenities they have, whether or not utilities are paid, when the possession date is, what renter they're looking for, the landlord's contact info, and last (but certainly not least) how much the monthly rental fees are.
One one-bedroom apartment in the Montreal and Raglan Road area was going for $120 a month, which is just painstakingly cheap compared to some of the rental prices that residents in the GTA are paying. Even calculating the rate of inflation between 1972 to today, that same unit's rent would be going for $768.97 each month.
The most expensive unit visible on the newspaper clipping is a two-bedroom apartment with parking and all of its utilities included that went for $175 per month, which according to the Bank of Canada's inflation calculator would cost renters today $1,121.41 every month. Recently a one-bedroom apartment in Kingston was going on average $1,358 a month, which is considered affordable in Ontario in our modern-day.
Now, were these places considered affordable back then? Well, according to the Government of Canada's historical data for hourly minimum wage rates, Ontario was offering $1.65 an hour to its minimum wage workers back in 1971 (which got later got 15 cent raise in '73.)
If you were working a full 40 hours each week at minimum wage, you'd be making about $264 a month. That means at the cheapest unit going for $120 per month, about 45% of your paycheck would go towards rent alone.