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Comment by kmanraj | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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