I was living in downtown Toronto (one street south of Bloor St, corner with Church St) for 4 years, in that time my rent went from 1800, to 1900, to my landlord threatening to move her son into the unit just to evict me unless I accepted 2500, for the same unit. A small 1bdrm without a balcony, in a building from the 70s.
I was making a pretty normal tech worker salary, and struggling on 2500/m. (90k CAD in early 2020) Looking around there were only similar or more expensive options. Many of them were "ready to move in". (Aka, vacant) The pandemic barely put a dent in those prices.
I moved to Montréal, currently have a 2bdrm so I can have a home office, on the ground floor of a triplex with a little sunken balcony, in the gay village, for 1500/m.
I don't even know why I'd live in Toronto, it's just become a bad deal now. Doesn't matter who you are. If you think of rent and cost of living as the "subscription" to a city, there's no way you're getting that sort of value out of it.
> I don't even know why I'd live in Toronto, it's just become a bad deal now. Doesn't matter who you are.
For a lot of Canadians/Torontonians (everyone I know), family and friend bonds keep them there.
Canada is not an easy country to hop around. The next metropolitan city over is an expensive flight, and heaven forbid one of those sides includes Pearson Airport.. Canadians are culturally less flighty than Americans in my experience. And the options to move to are quite limited (again, in comparison to the USA)
Source: I've lived 2/3 my life in Canada, 1/3 in the US.
As a fellow Montreal-er I agree with you in principle. Our city is beautifully diverse, and it's decently lively. Many of my peers agree that living in Toronto is infeasible, economically, and culturally. That said, I've found that living in Montreal is far from ideal.
A big issue is that Montreal's salaries are, as other commenter have said, upwards of 30% lower here. With rising rent and real estate costs, people are living outside their means. More than that, though, companies outside of Montreal are loathe to hire Montrealers remotely as well. It's not just because of the decline of remote friendly workplaces, but also the language laws in Quebec. Any legal department worth their weight will look at Quebec's requirements for companies to serve Quebec employees in French, and promptly conclude hiring there isn't worth it.
It really seems like no matter where you end up in Canada the cards are stacked against you. Vancouver is just as expensive as Toronto, and Montreal has all the aforementioned issues. At this point I'm considering running off to Europe, but I know that has its own host of issues as well. I might just be falling victim to analysis paralysis, but I definitely feel stuck.
Ahhh yep! I had to deal with that while looking for another job a few months ago. I had it in mind that remote work meant I could work anywhere. Not here! You really are locked into Québec once Revenu Québec is handling your taxes, got dropped for being a Qc resident multiple times.
I’ve thought about Europe as well, I’ll need to reevaluate in a few years to see if that’s still a positive move for me. The French expats I work with they have their own complaints and reasons for crossing the Atlantic.
While you are right, said 2bdrm were costing 1100-1200 per month in 2019 in Montreal. So prices are catching up in Montreal as well. Surely it's not THAT bad yet, but also keep in mind that typical after tax income in QC is probably 30% lower than in ON.
The first half convinced me I wrote this myself while sleep walking or something. In fact, I lived one block South of Bloor/Church on Charles St… Wow! However I moved to the US for the much higher salaries.
Hah! Sorry I just saw this now, that's so funny, charles st E., small world! I actually loved that area, it's a shame I couldn't afford it anymore. I miss the late-night runs to Rabba on the other corner.
It’s insane that Canada doesn’t have true 30 year fixed mortgages. Every 5 years the rates will update and if the payment is too high for you there’s nothing you can do about it. How can you live?
Germany: fixed mortgages are the norm (actually never even heard of another type), common runtimes are 10, 15, and 20 years, and no matter what the runtime is, as the borrower you can simply exit the contract without even giving a reason after 10 years; and that’s not something in the contract, it’s a federal law.
You obviously have to pay back the remaining debt, but this makes it super smooth to either pay off all debt in one go or refinance.
You can refinance earlier, or any time after the 10-year-period, if your contract is 10+ years.
Anything after the 10-year-period comes without any kind of penalty.
Getting out of the contract earlier is possible, but comes with a penalty called Vorfälligkeitsentschädigung — it boils down to the bank demanding the interest payments you would have paid if you‘d stayed in the contract for the whole 10 years.
However, afaik, if you also had an agreement on „Sondertilgungen“, that is, if the contract allows to pay x% of additional down payment every year, the bank must assume you had paid this for the remaining years in the contract.
It doesn’t even seem to make sense from an economic standpoint, leaving the population essentially to gamble and having approx 20% of mortgages coming due each year, threatening the banking sector.
Surely this isn’t that big of a deal for most people? After 5 years you could just refinance the loan and reset it to 30 years again with lower payments.
No mortgages don’t have early payoff penalties. The bank doesn’t really care. They’ve probably sold your mortgage off to be packaged in a bond anyways. They’re mainly in the business of selling loans. There’s a big margin on that. They’re more than happy to payoff your old one and write a new one and collect those fees.
If not, I assume someone would have written a 3/1 ARM with predatory early repayment provisions, so I'm guessing there's probably a conformant mortgage guideline (e.g. from *Mac) that prevents clauses like that.
There's nothing about refinancing that requires your house value to increase.
The concept is that you are taking out a loan to pay off an earlier loan.
If you borrowed at 8% and rates dropped to 2%, you could refinance even if your house price dropped, and it would still make sense, as you borrowed what you borrowed, and still owe it.
Now, if you are trying to refinance and take some money out from equity, sure, that relies on having greater equity than the loan value.
I think the exception to this is if you're underwater on your mortgage. Then the new bank won't give you a new loan against the house for more than its worth.
This is of course stupid on the part of everyone involved
but especially the person who currently owns your loan. Lowering the interest rate for a person with an underwater mortgage can only increase the security of it as a financial asset. If they default it's pure loss. But a new bank doesn't want to take on an underwater mortgage and even at the institution that owns your loan the left hand originating mortgages doesn't know what the right hand is doing servicing them.
so whoever lent you at 8% would take a loss if you could just abandon that rate and went with someone else's 2% rate. Therefore, it can't be this simple - somebody must be eating a loss. I suspect that 'somebody' is Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae , which is a quasi-gov't corporation and therefore, they might be able to take the loss without worrying about profitability.
Why would they? If I lend you $100 at 8% interest and for simplicity let's say it's an interest only loan so you only pay the interest I get $8/yr for my trouble. Then you refinance with someone else at 2% and I get my $100 back. All good, now it's available to me to loan back out. The only thing I've "lost" is future profits but you also could have just paid off the loan entirely in cash to the same effect.
> The only thing I've "lost" is future profits but you also could have just paid off the loan entirely in cash to the same effect.
but this is a real loss, since the original loan contract was for 8% p/a for X years.
In a different country like australia, a fixed term loan cannot be paid off without the expected interest. This is why i am confused as to what makes refinancing work - who eats the loss?
Its not a loss, its an unrealized gain. What happens is they just don't get to have it, but they still get their principle returned as well as any interest up that point -- i.e. they made still made a profit.
I also live in a country without full-term fixed mortgages, however we also don’t have a secondary market for mortgages. AFAIK these two things are at the very least not entirely orthogonal, and to be blunt I don’t think anyone is looking to the US as a source of inspiration for that aspect of your mortgage system.
Good! And hope to be followed by the housing market crash, it’s abysmal at this point! I don’t think there’s any advantage of living downtown Toronto than say a small city, all connections can be made online, same with business meetings and such, food is bad, overly crowded it took me a whole hour to pass through downtown during covid lockdown, plus all the safety concerns that some of my friends who live there mentioned that started to happen after the pandemic.
What’s the solution? When a story about suburbs appears, the ideas promoted by the Strong Towns group are mentioned. Is there a similar set of ideas for fixing cities?
Land value tax. Makes speculation infeasible and low-density development uneconomical and eliminates a lot of the incentives that drive restrictive zoning.
Also allows the public to capture the financial upside of public infrastructure projects (e.g. building a billion dollar subway today produces a huge amount of wealth for the landowners who happen to be near that project, in the form of increased rent — that can and should be captured by the public who paid for it).
A simple starting point is changing local zoning that implicitly or explicitly requires single-family homes in most places. Even just allowing rowhouses would make for significantly higher density in some places.
There’s a place for that but one of the reasons many places are desirable is precisely because there isn’t so much density and that everyone owns their properties. It stops becoming nice when you change that too much.
And there’s infrastructure. Places that weren’t designed for the density don’t have the water/sewer, electrical, etc capacity. Traffic too - now there’s more traffic making a place not as nice. So that needs to be sorted out too.
The answer is to sort all those problems out and let the space evolve, rather than turn whatever crop of assholes who coincidentally happened to buy houses there 30 years ago into a permanent landed gentry
Who pays for those problems to be resolved? It’s literally what property taxes fund. Why would property owners pay to solve a problem they don’t have to make their town a worse place to live?
That would help the startup scene (at least in the form of less risky VC), but real estate I'm not sure. Canadians are mortgaged up to their eyeballs. That 5y due date is coming up for a many folks with 2-3% mortgages, and will add a $1000-1500/mo drain to their budgets. Canada is not a place where you can easily capture a 12k/y raise.
I wish Canadians would chime in on what exactly they do when that scenario comes. Is there going to be a flood of people selling homes that have become too expensive to make mortgage payments on? Or will they just eat shit because they have no choice?
Banks have the ability to do "negative amortization" on mortgages in canada. Which means instead of raising the monthly payment on a mortgage the owner is essentially just paying off the raised interest, and in some cases aren't even paying off the interest so the total owed is actually increasing.
Question is where do they go and will they find a better place than Toronto. I haven't been there, however it looks like a reasonable place to live. There is everything a young person would want. Everyone is fleeing everywhere then they don't find what they were looking for then they flee back.
As a person living in the border of middle east, Toronto is a place that people would like to migrate.
Just for context I live in Montreal about 6 hours east and have most of the same job prospects but just to quote the very first source I found:
“ You would need around 8,129.0C$ in Toronto to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 6,400.0C$ in Montreal “
And I really do feel that as a recent graduate I pay for a 1 bedroom apt what some friends in Toronto pay to share a 5 bedroom house it’s a big investment for a young person just to live there
What exactly is it that Toronto has you can't get anywhere else?
The Blue Jays? The Raptors?
That's pretty much it I'm sure.
If you're gonna tell me some nonsense about the culture of the city being so unique, save it. Every city has nightclubs and concerts and art shows and theater plays and other artsy stuff.
Every city has a food scene nowadays too, and fancy cafes and whatever else.
Best sporting events in Canada, biggest cultural events, the target for most Canadian musicians so you end up with both all the major touring acts as well and tons of smaller local shows every night. Professionally it's the place to be in Canada if you're in film, music, tech, finance, bio, and I'm sure a few more.
Food scene is great, hockey scene is amazing even if we do have the Leafs.
As much of a joke as the saying is, it really is the centre of the universe in Canada and benefits from the perception of such.
You have to be super bitter to say Toronto isn't actually that special in Canada, go watch Everyone hates Toronto or something.
I'm just going to go ahead and assume you've never been to any other cities in Canada. You're clueless if you think they do have food scenes, hockey scenes, major touring acts as well as tons of local shows every night, etc.
Even Victoria, which is tiny compared to Toronto, has all of that.
It's the size, frequency and diversity that is unique to Toronto on top of the job market and cultural centres.
So all those cities have the same things but in much smaller quantities and generally missing out on larger events which Toronto is never skipped for.
I don't live in Toronto and haven't for more than short stints in nearly 25 years. Toronto is a great city. Vancouver is a beautiful boring sprawl and it's got some great things within a short drive. Montreal has a good cultural scene but fails on the job market. All the rest of the cities are too small to compare.
Other parts of Canada aren't terrible and definitly make more sense than Toronto for a lot of people. But Toronto has a combination of things that no other city in Canada compares to and to deny that is to be delusional.
Having lived in Victoria, Ottawa, and Toronto there’s no way in hell can you even put those in the same league, not even close to what Toronto has to offer. I’m gonna have to turn the assumption towards you and assume you’ve never lived in Toronto yourself, maybe just visited and toured the trifecta of the CN tower, Ripley’s, and Niagara Falls.
I think it's much more expensive to be a migrant. You do know how to live cheaper in your native country. It's difficult for a foreigner to learn those later.
Not in Toronto (I live in Houston), but we actually did the opposite.
Living 30 or 40m away from the city was great in theory, but sucked given that we did that trip every weekend (or sometimes during the weekdays). Also, the suburb we lived in was not walkable at all. The sprawl was insane and sidewalks were a rarity.
What do you like better about your quality of life? Also, personally, how do you feel about the level of activity?
I guess people who prefer city life are those who like the faster pace, dynamics of more and more variety of people, art, food, services, parks, festivals, etc. etc. Not that one preference is better than the other.
> If I ever want to go do stuff, its only 30-40 minutes away too.
Lol. Spoken like a suburbanite! :D Depending on where exactly you live, everything in Manhattan would be within 30-40 minutes.
> WFH has been liberating for so many people.
Also, many cities see an increase in residents (but a decrease in office workers). People like to work from homes in the city.
But I don't mean to be disagreeing. Glad you found what you liked, and many have followed your path.
>What do you like better about your quality of life?
Mainly, how the actions of others (good or bad) don't have as much of an effect on me. Believe it or not, one of the main things was people smoking weed. People would smoke it endlessly. I attempted pretty much every solution before moving. It smelled awful and got into my sinuses and would make me get an instant sore throat. Similar to cigarette smoke. I guess I'm allergic but basically if it got in my respiratory system, my sinuses would be effected and make it next to impossible to breath through my nose. This often would then lead to sinus infections and always a sore throat every night. I literally felt like I had a cold every other day.
I moved apartments but the same damn thing happened. Now, that could be bad luck or it could just be a new normal, I don't care to find out though.
Also now, with an actual area to do "DIY" stuff, I can run power tools and play guitar with amp without annoying anyone, lol.
>Lol. Spoken like a suburbanite! :D Depending on where exactly you live, everything in Manhattan would be within 30-40 minutes.
My bad, by "stuff" I meant city stuff like shows, entertainment, fancy restaurant, etc. For day to day, I'm only a 5-10 minute drive. I've actually been saving a ton of time in tons of ways you don't really consider. 1-2 hours of groceries a week is better (at least according to my wife) than 20-30 minutes every few days.
>Also, many cities see an increase in residents (but a decrease in office workers). People like to work from homes in the city.
That's good. Seems we all are getting what we want, thanks to WFH.
That sucks. IME, one needs to pay a bit of a premium to live someplace where you can be assured of not having such headaches (not that wealthy people are better neighbors, but that problem-free residence is in higher demand).
It's interesting to see some people seek to be further from others. I imagine it like particles in a given volume: fewer particles collide less, while I happen to love the energy of more (though not things like second hand smoke in my home). To me, it's like going to a concert - I want it to be wall-to-wall, not mostly empty. (Again YMMV.)
>That sucks. IME, one needs to pay a bit of a premium to live someplace where you can be assured of not having such headaches (not that wealthy people are better neighbors, but that problem-free residence is in higher demand).
Oh yea, 100%. The second place I got the problem was not nearly as bad but still made me feel sick about once a month during a "party" or something.
I had the pleasure of living next to 3-4 college kids. I guess they split the rent. I also moved to Texas where its generally not as legal so I believe they tend to use devices that limits the smell/spread. So it wasn't nearly as bad but sometimes you just wanted peace from that, ya know.
And yep, to the particle analogy. I had plenty of good interactions with people. Sadly, the negative ones just sucked too much.
I have the same experience in LA with the weed/tobacco smoke, but also just all of the damn chemicals my neighbors use in their daily life.
Before moving to the city, I expected the traffic and crowds would be the primary drawback compared to suburbia. But I’ve found that the smells and sounds of my own neighbors’ activities to be the worst, like running their loud AC 24/7 even in winter, and spraying copious Lysol and febreeze multiple times a day.
Love living in this city with all of the activities nearby, but I’m 100% ready to gtfo and don’t think I’ll miss it.
Right!? I swear people know when to do it at the worst times too. When I first moved, it was because they triggered the building wide alarm system at 2 AM. After that, I was sick of it and couldn't take it anymore.
Also, I get that you're going to smell food/odd stuff from neighbors from time to time but there's only so much you can handle.
Everybody is different, but what I like has changed a lot over the past 35 years and I don’t expect that to stop. The city was the right place for me for part of my life, but right now it really isn’t. When I get old and need more access to healthcare, it might be again.
That seems like the typical pattern? City when you're young, move to the suburbish place when you have a family, and back to the city (in a different neighborhood) when you're retired.
For retirees, especially when driving is a problem, all the service, transportation, etc. can be great. Also, you have time again for all the fun and want activity, unlike people raising a family who barely have time to sleep.
Toronto is such that you can go from the financial district to farmland in less than 40 minutes.
It's a bit annoying living outside the core when you are young since cabs are expensive and regional pubic transit unavailable late but outside of that everything else is pretty close to just as accessible you just have to plan more in advance where when i lived downtown I could just be bored one afternoon and go find a cool event
> It's a bit annoying living outside the core when you are young since cabs are expensive and regional pubic transit unavailable late
Use a bike? If you don't want to cycle all the way to the city park it at the last all-night public transport stop and take the bus/tram/train/whathaveyounot to the city from there?
Maybe it is my Dutch heritage or maybe just common sense but anything up to ~15km is within an easy bike ride range, 20km if needed. OK, you can't get drunk like a skunk but why would you do that anyway? A few beers are fine, you'll cycle them off anyway.
In my eyes cities look at their best when you see them disappearing on the horizon after a pleasant night out.
I've never been to Toronto so maybe this prospect is totally unthinkable there but I've spent a few weeks around Vancouver - it was meant to be only a few days since I was scheduled to fly out on the 11th of September, 2001 - where cycling was just as feasible as in most European cities.
As mentioned regional transport is spotty at night and even then you are probably looking at a 15-30km trip from the nearest stop on 80km roads with small shoulders. It's also completely out of the question for the 6-7 months a year snow is on the ground.
15 km is doable, 30 is (literally) taking it a bit far so that would be reserved for once or twice a year events. Snow on the ground is not that much of a problem as long as it isn't a metre deep where you're supposed to cycle. I live in Sweden where snow isn't uncommon either and cycle the year trough, if need be on a bike with studded tyres but mostly on a fairly normal 24-speed 29" wheel steel-framed bike. Cycle paths are mostly absent here as well, at least in the countryside where I live. The 80km roads are 70km gravel roads but for the rest the situation is quite comparable I think.
Honestly riding a bike in the winter with little shoulder space on 70km roads sounds like a death wish to me. I really don't think it'd be appropriate around Toronto countryside as a solution and I find it hard to believe it's common where you are too but glad you found something you enjoy.
No, it is not common, as said this might be might be my Dutch heritage showing. My daughters - 12 and 18 - are also 'affected' in that they are used to cycling where their friends expect to be driven.
>I could just be bored one afternoon and go find a cool event
Yea, I'd say this is probably the worst part about living outside of a city. Just not as many events to go to easily. At the end of the day though, the 30-40 minute drive isn't too bad when its something you really want to go to and plan for.
Yes, different people have different desires when it comes to their living situation. Your comment does however come across as dismissive of living outside of a city. “Parks” for instance…from my experience, a city would not be where I’d first look for this.
Sorry, I'm not trying to dismiss anyone. I do love cities, but that's my thing.
> “Parks” for instance…from my experience, a city would not be where I’d first look for this.
Cities often have all sorts of interesting and varied parks, often beautifully designed, with public art, museums, etc. Look at Central Park, Golden Gate Park, the parks along the lake in Chicago, etc. Look up all the parks in Manhattan alone. LA has wild valleys near the Hollywood Hills. And if you look around, you can find lots of wonderful, unknown, small parks. The economy of scale - resources to design, build, etc. - can lead to some wonderful spaces.
Obviously, out where there's more space, there are larger undeveloped areas; those differ from urban parks.
I know a lot of people working in Markham have moved to Brooklin. Uxbridge is ok since it's easy to get to Stouffville for rail during peak times but I'd want to be closer to 404 if going north for out off hours transport. Like Keswick/Newmarket.
This is more like cities driving people out than it is people intentionally deciding to leave. Most of the affordability crisis here comes down to bad local zoning causing an extreme lack of housing.
I’m not sure I agree with you. Toronto is already pretty dense and there’s a crazy amount of construction. I have a hard time believing the problem is zoning.
The core South of bloor is dense but outside of that with exception to a few spots along Yonge and the 401 Toronto is almost entirely single family housing.
Exactly. There's lots of intense density (50+ storey residential buildings) in a small geographic area, but for the other 75% of the land area of Toronto, it has been illegal to build even a 4-plex; zoning allows single family housing only. If you look at neighborhoods in Montreal where there are blocks upon blocks of 4-6 storey low-rise, that type of construction simply doesn't exist in Toronto.
Some good search terms for this topic are "the yellowbelt"[1] and "the missing middle"[2].
Original title, which does not imply that young people are fleeing from economists: "Thousands of young people are fleeing Toronto — economists say the city will suffer because of it"
Given they were policy problems, fleeing economists was pretty accurate. I left the city and am looking at leaving the province over the chaos of what are all government caused problems with no path to getting out of the way for people to solve them. Not a lot of Austrians or Chicago School economists working in policy these days.
The change is unmanaged. The question is whether they are starting businesses that provide some semblance of the quality of life and opportunity people from here had planned to make for themselves or not, and whether the government has just sold the locals out for foreign political donations. We don't solve inequality by importing more of it.
Toronto is interesting. The scale of construction is immense. Visibly unlike anything you see in the states. Presumably drowning in immigration though.
Canadian college graduates are going to feel less happy living with a bunch of other people to share the rent with than immigrants who frequently are ok with multigenerational households.
I left Toronto for an even more expensive area(Bondi) and i see this here too with backpackers willing to live 6 people to a 3 bed apartment while locals feel priced out at the 1 bed or studio level.
Because they’re willing to stuff many people in a single residence. Like 3 or 4 to a bedroom. I worked at a place with many migrants and one group had like 10 guys staying in the apartment and they more or less hot bunked the beds as they worked across different shifts.
Because immigrants (Indians specifically) at least in the US are highly educated/entrepreneurial and have no problems finding a job as a result of which are very wealthy.
Not really. They’re really aren’t very many Indians in the US living anywhere close to the poverty line. The second part of your statement also assumes they were rich before they came here. They come here poor and then get rich. This may be different in Canada of course.
I don’t know much here either way but I can’t help but wonder if they’re not missing some nuance on the meaning of new permits. I would like to see it as new units constructed.
You can Google the specifics but Canada has the highest per capita immigration of the G20 according to our newspapers (I’ve never checked the underlying data), and the vast majority go to Toronto and Vancouver as our biggest and most multicultural cities. I don’t think OP’s presumption is misplaced.
