We moved to a town a couple hours away from Toronto, and the prices were shockingly comparable to Halifax, while Halifax household incomes are lower.
People see if they don't buy in now, they may never be able to buy in, and are buying in, driving prices up further, causing more people to panic buy, etc.
It also leads speculators to buy houses because they see property giving incredible returns. Pay in many of these cities, or employment opportunities that pay well, are limited.
If they're relatively reasonable now at this pace they won't be for much longer.
Alberta is perhaps a little different because they seem to build new housing much faster than many other provinces.
Just in October they announced that the child healthcare system was at capacity and they might have to start diverting patients to other provinces. How does that work for people who aren't on remote engineer salary, and how does that bode for the future of halifax?
The answer for us is that all the local service providers live far outside the core urban areas and have terrible commutes. Or they double or triple-up, multiple families per unit. As the area becomes increasingly unlivable for people that do the local gruntwork, a number of them leave the metro area. Those that stay have less competition, and so they start charging higher wages. Eventually the local economy equalizes at a much higher price point; local service workers find they make a livable wage again; globalized tech workers find that most of their income is eaten up by daycare, housecleaning, gardening, and restaurant meals out (to say nothing of housing); and the whole region settles into an uneasy truce, yet enjoys great geographic arbitrage opportunities over other regions. We can go make Halifax unaffordable and live like a king there, for example.
> Don’t live in big cities (go for smaller, more liveable towns).
FAANG companies hiring people in Italy do the same. If you can find a stupid employer who'll pay you a San Francisco salary to live in Souther Italy, then good for you, but that's _rare_.
The 'robust safety net' that you think is in place in Italy is a poor-people subsidy which is currently being discussed because totally abused by a lot of users (and it's becoming unsustainable for Italy's devastated economic situation). So the only good thing the author did is fleeing this ticking bomb.
Could you elaborate on this or provide a source? Curious because I'm in the US in tech with a canadian citizenship.
Author is basically engaging in a form of geographic arbitrage by working remote from Europe. They get to enjoy wages comparable to U.S. programmers, but get the European social safety net, and since they're not living in a big city, rural cost of living. It's not unlike U.S. tech workers who choose to live in a remote rural village, or Californians who retire to Boise at age 30, or Canadians who come to Silicon Valley to work for a FANG and found a startup and then retire to Canada after doing that for 7-10 years. (The latter is my favorite, because Canada allows citizens a step up in capital gains basis upon moving back to Canada, so you can make literally millions in Silicon Valley stock over a few years and pay zero tax on it, then enjoy the Canadian social safety net for retirement.)