That doesn't mean the Layton-Chow's were in a co-op for slippery reasons. I'm sure they believe they were supporting a better path. Maybe Chow could redirect the conversation about her past arrangement to the housing disconnect in Toronto today, where massive amounts of new units are being constructed but housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable, even for people with good jobs. Maybe frame the conversation not in terms of homeless in the streets but grown children who can't afford to move out of the house and get on with their lives, while the market produces a surplus of penthouses begging for multi-millionaire overseas investors.
There's a few ways she could spin that, in my view. One is the 'trying to be part of the solution' approach you mention. Another could be about wanting to be among the people whose interests need to be represented, as opposed to people whose interested are almost always looked out for.
The key to it is that these criticisms of her and Layton for being in some kind of housing that is facilitated for people with (much) lower incomes, while earning salaries as elected officials, boil down to: 'That's not where they should be living' and/or 'They should be paying more'. None of them ever really outline what would have been appropriate accommodation for them or an appropriate level of expenditure.
However, it's not as difficult to defend wanting to be among the citizens you represent as it is to claim that you represent them while living in circumstances that are very dissimilar to theirs and probably unattainable for them.
That's where Stintz' assertion that she was 'like you' fell down: through the immediacy of social media, people quickly reminded her that she was very likely not like them at all ... that they didn't actually have a car and/or a mortgage and/or kids and even if they did, their priorities weren't necessarily the same. (I'm not sure what soccer games had to do with anything, but I'm pretty sure you can find a diversity of political views among soccer parents, so not really a good hook for political sympathies).
I don't know where John Tory lives but I imagine it's not a familiar environment to most Torontonians aside from those inclined to vote for him nonetheless. He didn't go the 'I am like you' route because he probably realizes that he isn't and that people don't want to hear that from him. If Chow lived in that kind of area, she'd be considered out of touch.
