It's not specific to Canada, you'll get the exact same issue abroad: aside from a few exceptions (e.g. Japan) real estate prices in popular locations keeps climbing ever upwards, significantly faster than income does. I'm guessing real estate is cheaper in YT than it is in Vancouver.

True, Vancouver features pretty highly internationally as a desirable city to live in. But there are lots of desirable cities abroad that aren't nearly as crazy expensive. There are no affordable and really desirable cities in Canada - Halifax is perhaps the closest, but that still falls pretty short of the mark (apologies to people from Halifax, but that's my opinion.)

Hah. Just made the Vancouver to Halifax move for exactly the reasons you cite. It’s a great place to be for young families. Affordable, welcoming, walkable, lots of nature close by. No roots here but did the math and took the path that 20 of our friends have taken and left Vancouver. And not even close to looking back.

> There are no affordable and really desirable cities

You can't have one without the other!

You absolutely can if you broaden your world to outside of Canada.

Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton. All pretty nice cities, all are decent sized, fairly affordable and have jobs.

I don't think of Calgary as affordable. And the weather is bloody awful. I spent 13 years there.

It's become much more affordable since the oil recession, although there's less oil related jobs now (but it's good if you're in another industry). As for the weather, it's not terrible, sunny summers and all. But I also like winter, and can drive from my condo to Banff in one hour even.

Montreal.

True, it's not so bad there yet. It's so cold in the winter though - but that's nearly all of Canada.

Montreal Winters are much worse than Toronto's and Vancouver's.

I don’t know how you got your info about Japan, but even smaller homes in Tokyo (according to Japanese standards) can run up to $500,000. If I’d get something similar to what I’d have in the Netherlands we go up to $1.5M.

Japan is bigger than Tokyo! Anywhere outside of Tokyo, even in beautiful livable world-class cities, the prices for Japanese homes are quite reasonable.

For example, this is in a very central and convenient part of Kyoto: https://www.realestate.co.jp/forsale/view/538465

Or this one, for half the price: https://www.realestate.co.jp/forsale/view/438354

Other cities outside of Kyoto are even less expensive.

Indeed. You could easily find places for $50000 or even less if you wanted to.

The problem is any job I’ve ever had is in Tokyo.

Good point. It does depend on the field though.

For software, there's probably not a lot of other options. For mechanical engineering there's a lot of interesting work all over the country.

Should have gone with my second choice of career then :P

Not much work there without fluent Japanese though, so I guess it turned out alright. I’ll just have to deal with houses costing a small fortune.

I've been asking myself, "what Ontario city is currently where Waterloo was 30 years ago?"

I'd move there.

It's an interesting question, one I have been thinking about too. I'm not sure there is a place that combines a strong university town with easy access to (but separation from) Toronto and room for growth in quite the same way. Maybe St Catherines if they make Brock a huge priority? The former industrial sections are much like Kitchener was, just waiting for the right companies to need cheap space.

Ottawa is always going to be a government town first even though it has it's own tech scene, anything in the GTA gets swallowed by Toronto, Barrie and Brantford don't have universities, Windsor is too far from Toronto, but they might be able to piggyback on Detroit's revival if they play their cards right, London is stagnant and has been for decades, Kingston is on the wrong side of Toronto to really take advantage of Pearson, Guelph has already benefitted from Waterloo's explosion and the north is too harsh for many people.

I came to Waterloo for university about 15 years ago and never left. Despite real estate prices really jumping up, the investment in transit and transport through the region might mean south Kitchener and Cambridge are the next Waterloo.

KW is still a place where things make sense - a variety of housing with reasonable income multiples.

Same here. I dropped out of the vancouver tech/law ratrace. Now im working for a government agency on the island. Slightly less pay but greater takehome.

The lovely Vancouver model [0] isn't helping things I'm sure. Toronto isn't as bad but it seems to be getting steadily worse. [0] https://globalnews.ca/news/4149818/vancouver-cautionary-tale...