Hacker News Reader

The major tech centers in Canada have major housing price issues. The housing to salary ratio in Vancouver and Toronto are terrifying.

View on HN

Montreal's housing is comically affordable compared to most cities on the east and west coasts.

Everything is on par with or cheaper, East of Montreal.

What? There's not much of anything east of Montreal. IBM did (does?) have some offices in the Eastern Townships, but that's not very far from Montreal.

Looking at a map, I see Sherbrooke, Quebec City, Fredricton, then Moncton, and Halifax. Quebec City is probably the largest at about ~500k people, and has some tech industry. Dalhousie University in Halifax has some decent science programs too. After that, the next biggest tech center is probably London.

An exception is Waterloo.

But Waterloo isn't a great city to live in. Especially for young professionals, Waterloo is not nearly as exciting as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver.

I think Kitchener-Waterloo (~300k people) punches above its weight. It definitely feels like a small city, but there are still things to do. Plus Toronto is 1.5 hours away on a Greyhound bus for about $15. ;)

Waterloo demographically compares to Raleigh. I make no judgement about relative merits of living there, but just in size it's small.

[edit] just Raleigh mind you, The Triangle is much bigger than that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com