Vancouver is expensive as ultra wealth has invaded that city. Toronto is the preferred choice for immigrants for most are accustomed to super large cities. As we know, demands spikes up prices. What I find though, through You Tube vlogs of Edmonton, foreigners are now giving Edmonton and Calgary a look for the job and affordable factors.
I wouldn’t say that’s the predominate reason Toronto is the preferred choice. It’s simply the most known and has existing large ethnic communities for all the major immigrant countries (and more), which means it has amenities and supports and often relatives too. This is changing, anyway, as a lot of immigrants are ending up in cities like Edmonton now.
You categorize Calgary as "a bit" more expensive than Edmonton. It's almost 30% more expensive in terms of the average mortgage payment and rental rate. I think the technical definition of "a bit" or "slightly" is only 10% or less.
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My mistake. It is still significantly cheaper than Southern Ontario and BC, though, and so remains “affordable” to people in those cities. It’s definitely pushing upwards though, which makes sense. It has the most recognition for outsiders and is generally seen as a desirable city. The other Prairie cities, regardless of your personal feelings about them, don’t have that outside impression.
Montreal and Calgary are the next grouping of cities in terms of expense after Toronto, Kitchener, Ottawa, Hamilton, Barrie, Victoria, Vancouver, and Kelowna. They’re formerly pretty cheap and still notably cheaper than those other cities, but have migrated from the still-cheap cities it used to hang out with, and are the next in line to join the expensive group.
These stupid comparisons with Calgary scream low self-esteem.
There are plenty of people who think Calgary, Toronto or Vancouver are superior. That's fine. They can believe that no one wants to live here or that there are no good jobs, but that doesn't make it true. The fact is that when it costs $1M+ for a house in Barrie, regular suburban families are going to start making a choice in larger numbers to move to places where the cost of living is lower and incomes are higher. Despite what some might want to be true, regular people will continue moving to Edmonton in larger and larger numbers.
With that said, the one thing I have to give Calgarians is their relentless boosterism. They are desperate to convince themselves almost as much as others of how great their city is. I wish Edmonton had more of that energy because frankly people who are relentlessly negative don't come off as particularly clever -- in fact, they seem quite provincial in worse sense of the word.
It would help if Edmonton had stuff to boost. I’m well traveled and love cities, and as a city Edmonton has a lot of work to do. It has a lot of potential, but the city’s main selling feature for outsiders is that it’s cheap (and not a shithole), and it looks it too for the most part. Even our new fancy designer alley in WEM has glossy storefronts meet the tarnished terazzo of yesteryear.
There are some beautiful bits to Edmonton, but its few and far between, and with every step forward, it feels like we take two steps backwards. For every Ice District, we get Regency either producing ugly condos or leaving prime sites vacant and a mass exodus of retail from downtown. Still, there is hope. The Valley Line will be a gamechanger if/when it finally opens, and hopefully areas like Whyte get LRT sooner than later. At least our existing LRT is much better designed than Calgary’s. Maybe 124th will finally take off, a quarter century after revitalization efforts began. If the City can pull off a successfully inviting, destination-worthy Warehouse Park, it’ll do a lot for the core and hopefully spur more development like the Parks, which is a significant improvement from the botched towers of 104th that Langham gave us (and continues to give us). Maybe one of these years Fox will have all of its CRUs filled.
I think the thing with Edmonton is there’s just so much to fix, it’s exhausting. And most people who choose Edmonton don’t care. They just want a cheap house off Ellerslie Road and a decent enough job to afford an all-inclusive in January. This isn’t a city of taste, it’s a city of convenience.
Edmonton is very much a blue-collar, government and family town.