Justin Giovannetti is a Montreal-based journalist.
When my fiancée and I decided to announce we were leaving New Zealand to return to Canada, I prepared myself for awkward conversations. I needn’t have worried. Most of our friends beat us to the punch with their own plans to leave, turning the first months of 2022 into a long going-away party. For those who remained, the conversation boiled down to one question: “It’s the housing, isn’t it?”
I arrived in New Zealand’s capital of Wellington in early 2020 with my fiancée, a New Zealander, to buy a house and start a family. We knew that the Pacific country’s overheated housing market would be a challenge, but we’d lived in…