Even before the quarantine made everyone reconsider why the hell they were also confining themselves to Paris, wealthy and mobile Parisians saw the opportunity to make Bordeaux home and commute when they needed to. I credit that almost entirely with the arrival of the two-hour TGV. It's as if three hours was too much time, and two hours was the magical threshold that made living between the two cities feasible.
Now it is teeming with Parisian opportunists, and I totally understand why. Paris has been crowded, polluted, and unreasonably expensive, and Bordeaux was quite literally the opposite: laid back yet sophisticated, beautifully framed along the Garonne river, and with easy access to nature and the ocean. But now with the sudden influx of Parisians, there is some malaise among the Bordelais that the city has fundamentally changed not only in demographics, but in cost and culture.
The before and after effects are palpable. I saw Bordeaux before the boom started. In 2016/2017, it was sleepy and still cleaning the blackened grime off the building façades. The rents and cost of living reflected a city still growing, but the city itself has long been wealthy and home to a UNESCO world heritage site. Now there are cranes everywhere. New developments are cropping up around the city, and the costs of rents and living have soared. It even feels louder. The housing stock is depleted because the newcomers have purchased everything. That's not all bad for landholders and property owners, but it really sucks if you're just trying to make your way into the market, let alone a student trying to rent something.
A part of me feels like it's a lost treasure that's now been overrun by the same people who make living in Paris so exasperating. I guess this is the nature of change, and I attribute it almost entirely to the TGV line. French life will always be centralized in Paris, and so without these high-speed lines, there is little reason to think Bordeaux would have grown so much if not for the reduced travel time.