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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

come back to Toronto where they also can't afford a home? Or live in the suburbs of the GTA and slog it through some of the worst traffic in North America for two hours each way?

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Compared to SF? And it's not the only factor. And I didn't say they'd all come back to Toronto. Schools, proximity to extended family, less likelihood of mass shooting, and room in your house for your kids can all be additional factors. If you're established enough in your career, you can work remote for US companies or bring work with you in some other way. Sure, Toronto and Vancouver aren't cheap, but they're more affordable than many places in the bay area, especially for what you get.

SF Bay Area isn't that much different from GTA. High housing costs, high cost of living, long commutes. Although the big difference is that the high salary somewhat makes up for it (although whether or not the salary is actually high enough is debatable).

Yep the salaries in the Bay Area are from what I have seen about double what one would get in the GTA. The housing prices are insane, but a nice three bedroom in Toronto that is transit accessible to the downtown is just shy of a million $ now, or over it. And the salaries are far lower.

So yeah, a lot of talent will just go south. Or get lucky like me and go work for Google in Waterloo. The actual Toronto employment market is pretty yuck.

> a nice three bedroom in Toronto that is transit accessible to the downtown is just shy of a million $ now

I own a house that is on two bus routes, and it takes me 45 ~ 50 minutes to get downtown (specifically work which is right downtown), and it's not even close to that price.

[That said, I looked into moving to another neighbourhood with worse transit access that was not that far away, and the real estate agent was selling it with a "crap" house for ~$800K with the idea that you would spend money on top of that to tear the existing house down and rebuild another one on top of it.]

Too late to edit, but I realize that I may have not been entirely clear with the 'not even close'. My house is worth much less than the $1m price point mentioned above.

Detached house is over 1M in Toronto. But there are plenty of semis and townhouses that are way less (700K?) and condos walkable to downtown for half of that.

Amazon is in a class-A tower right next to the banks and they cannot hire enough.

And ALL the good engineers I know have good jobs in Toronto or Waterloo. But there are plenty of bad ones that wouldn't pass a phone screen.

Winnipeg will rise again.

Montréal is going great too.

Something something Hamilton!

I definitely knew who wrote this comment before checking it.

I'm rooting for Hamilton. I live just outside it. It's a place with such huge potential.

But seems like the centre of gravity for not-Toronto tech in southern Ontario is Waterloo, unfortunately.

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