by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Daniel Taurozzi wants a baby. He doesn't particularly want a girlfriend but he wants a baby, and is looking at getting one of those Chinese orphan babies that you can get.

The 43-year-old Bell Canada employee says he's biologically capable of fathering a child and still likes women plenty but has decided parenthood won't wait for the full bloom of romance. He and a girlfriend got an idea to adopt but they split up. He held fast with his plan, passing hurdles that would allow him to become a single-adoptive father, and I think he'll be a good one.

He's ready for all the ritual and the chores and the scolding, shoelace-tying, swing pushing, and is probably bright enough to catch on to the small print of parenthood, which includes the ubiquitous kid who's allergic to peanuts. The allergy brat makes it verboten to pack anything peanuty in your own kid's lunch because that other kid might somehow get poisoned through some kinda osmosis. Last year they even gave us a fridge magnet with a picture of a frizzy-haired peanut kid, which I saw every time I fetched a beer. Another inexplicable kid thing: a lot of boys enjoy playing basketball, a sport that involves one part bouncing a ball, one part cussing and one part shoving your armpits into each others' noses.

So anyway, he has been okayed except for one little thing: he has to find a bigger apartment. But while nobody was looking, Montreal's organic balance between landlords and renters was diabolically unhinged.

Taurozzi reports that his efforts to land a home near the Jean-Talon metro has just put him face to face with one ripoff after another. As a gainfully employed guy making about $40k, one might expect easier times for him, but having had one of those jobs, I can tell you it's not as impressive as it sounds. Every biweekly pay packet sees $500 of tax grabs; the remains are surprisingly meagre.

Up until now, there's been no cause to panic because living was always cheap here. My first apartment at Mackay and the Boulevard then known as Dorchester was an all-included 3 1/2 for $130. I moved to a $300 place on DeBullion, then to another $300 apartment 100 yards from Peel and Ste-Catherine. My renting days ended five years ago when I bought a duplex in NDG for $65,000, numbers that have quickly become impossible-sounding.

Millions of us assumed that this burg would remain eminently liveable. Indeed native Montrealers differentiate themselves from come-from-aways by their proud ability to root out a good deal.

Traditionally a Montreal landlord would look on a tenant paying a cheap rent as superior to the alternative, which was an empty apartment. Nowadays landlords realize the alternative to having a low-paying tenant is having one that pays $3,000 more per year. All over the city, once-docile landlords are begging, cajoling and subtly pressuring their low-paying tenants to shove off. Cheap Montreal digs - once the norm - now face extinction.

This disappearance of a necessary resource has shocked and outraged a lot of people who consider that our social arrangement is a series of unwritten agreements. We consent to taxes that remove half of our earnings, plus GST and property taxes, welcome taxes and all sorts of government cash grabs. We agree to pay based on the tacit agreement that other necessities remain reasonable.

A friend who travels the world hanging out with billionaires tells me that the financial elites are only conscious of the poor as a potential source of disruption. Their condition doesn't matter as long as they don't become a threat. If conditions become so bad that Joe Sixpack takes to the streets, then the elites begin to notice and sudden jumps in rent and gas and other necessities inspire panic, betrayal, anger and indeed deprivation, all the elements of rebellion. And judging by our long history of riots, Montreal has always been open to that sort of thing.

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