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.