For decades, The Colonnade, the Manulife Centre, Fifty Prince Arthur and The Benvenuto reigned as the éminences grises of ritzy renting in Toronto, but a new generation of deluxe apartments is swinging into the skyline. In the past five years, real estate concerns Minto and Morguard have built MintoRoehampton at Yonge and Eglinton, 50 Portland near King and Bathurst and one of the most desirable rental addresses in the city, Minto­Yorkville at Bay and Yorkville.

Paying thousands of dollars in rent each month when interest rates are low may seem like lunacy. But for some people, the arrangement makes sense. They want a certain degree of luxury—in finishes, appliances and location—their cash flow is good, but they either don’t have quite enough capital for the several million it would take to buy a place that suits their standards (something down the street at the Hazelton, say) or simply don’t want to tie that much up in something as sedentary as a house or condo. “They are accomplished, often single people,” says George van Noten, the Minto executive in charge of the York­ville building, where rents range from $2,000 to about $14,500 a month. Pusateri’s is on the ground floor, and a quarter of the tenants have been there since the building opened. “They don’t want the headache of maintaining something that they own”—or paying someone to maintain it through condo fees. There’s also the issue of privacy: no land title means you’re practically untraceable. And if you do get married, when you get divorced, there’s no house for your spouse to get a piece of.

In cities like New York, Paris and Tokyo, where space has been at a premium for ages, mature and accomplished people often rent their whole lives with no expectation of ever owning. But here, anyone over 30 who’s been renting for a few years is likely to hear some variation on “You’re just throwing your money away” at every dinner party. (The volume of the jabs increases in direct proportion to the rent in question.)

The financial benefits of renting versus buying can be debated ad nauseam (once you deduct maintenance, interest and tax from those double-digit appreciation rates, is your house still a live-in savings account, etc.), but what it really comes down to is a question of ants and grasshoppers. Crypto- Protestants from Aesop forward have been trying to convince us that working hard during the good times and setting resources aside for the bad is the only way to live responsibly. And it’s true: you may not suffer quite as much through the bad, but it could also mean you’re house poor while everyone else is living it up.

Toronto has traditionally been perfectly happy with the rent-until-you-grow-up-and-buy-a-place model. But as our last calls creep ever earlier into the morning, as we teeter on the brink of being allowed to buy something other than hot dogs from our street vendors, we’re also coming round to not living our lives as if retirement were the only part that mattered. We’re moving, slowly, from renting out of necessity to renting for fun.