dbd33

I mean that money buys social status in Canada. It buys a place in a trouble free neighbourhood and it buys the ability to think the country doesn't have the same social problems one could not avoid at home. However, that only works if houses are cheaper here, it's like moving from Kings Cross to Virginia Water. If houses are the same price then it's like moving from King's Cross to Glasgow; out of the frying pan.


I'm not especially playing to the gallery. It wears me down that the streets are littered with bums and that people both threaten and proposition me every day. The relative lack of homeless beggars and the unthreatening demeanor of those that do exist is something I love about London.


No. There's nothing out there.

Yonge Street, just above Sam the Record Man, is a major thoroughfare. It's not especially a rough part you have to make a major journey to find. It features Covenant House, a home for disaffected youth and the Evergreen Youth Centre. The crowds hooking and selling drugs outside these premises are, I think, examples of trivial nuiscance behaviour and they're absolutely in plain view.

Liana

dbd, when we came here in the early 80s house prices in Alberta were even then twice as much as the majority of prices in the UK- London always the exception. But we came for the decent jobs- salaries then were 4 times the UK salaries. Now the salaries in both countries are about the same and UK house prices are incredible.
Reading for IT people would be better than Edmonton - at least the residents aren't going to get frost nips and bites on a regular basis.

Ian- you are probably right about the salaries but the point is what they can afford is not in nice places

dbd33

More genteel certainly. More civil. Dunno about the standard of living achievable without a wodge of cash though.

dbd33

Ah, yes, I do tend to forget that UK and London are not synonymous. Houses in Toronto in the early eighties cost the same in dollars as London ones did in pounds.

Notiaink...honest

I have no wodge of cash, and never did I seem to like it here and live in comfort to a reasonable standard...not like you city slickers with your horses and european convertibles of course, but comfortable enough.

Steve_P

You also tend to forget that your reality is not necessarily everyone else's reality or anyone else's reality for that matter.

dbd33

My! The noddy/faggot car elevated to "European convertible". Fancy that.

Notiaink...honest

You can buy a house (of sorts) in my trouble free neighbourhood for less than $100k and you will still be invited to the neighbourhood golf day and the Church Eucre? It takes a lot less money to avoid the sort of antisocial troubled neighbourhoods here, and the bad neighbourhoods in canada are harder to find in the first place. In a downtown, largely non residential neighbourhood, around what is bound to be a magnet for the down and out. Its hardly the same as the residential ex council estates of every town in the UK. Yes there are bums and hookers, every city has them. They are not swept under the rug here. But I dont think its fair to compare the desperate behaviour of addicts and the homeless with the behaviour of the non substance dependent part of UK society that chooses not to work, to claim benefits and to rob and steal to buy the latest Burberry handbag and then get shitfaced on tins of purple and then throw up on your car, if it hasnt been nicked. (I should cancel my Daily Mail subscription)

dbd33

OK. I used to live with a Newfie. Her lesbian sister lives in rent-geared-to-income housing at Markham Rd and Lawrence in Scarborough. She lives with her son, who is mixed race, on benefit. In the construction season they rent the floor of their place to fellow Newfies who come up, work enough weeks for their stamp and then go home and live on pogie for the winter. Another sister lives in Tuxedo Court, also in Scarborough (famous for the case of the machine guns belonging to the guy who fled to Florida), her two sons make a living dealing drugs from the apartment. They don't get shitfaced on tins of purple because they drink tins of Bud, backed with rum.

Since the Newfie was the youngest of fourteen this story could get long! Where I'm going though is that these people are living in just the same manner as people in sink estates in the UK. Metro housing has thousands of units filled with such people. We don't see them because immigrants here, as in the UK, are generally hard working, reasonably affluent and eager to stay out of trouble.

By emigrating we can go from being the people in the Mail to the people who read it but we do so, in large part, because we're relatively richer.

dbd33

<wanders off to drink imported beer in barn>

snorkmaiden

I'm sorry he is having to move Rete.

I am moving up to Edmonton (from Texas) in about two weeks time and we've been looking for rental property for a while.

The company my husband is going to work for employed a relocation agent to narrow down a list of properties for us, and could not find much at all in the price range we could afford. A three or four bedroom house in a "nice area" is $2000 and up per month, she told us anything below $1700 would not be a nice area.

Apparently there is a real shortage of rental property up there at the moment.

Notiaink...honest

<Wanders off to coach little kids the beautiful game>

MarkG

Until 2-3 years ago Canada seemed to have avoided the worst of the global housing bubble in most areas (Vancouver being an obvious exception, but land near the ocean is usually expensive). Unfortunately it's come in through the back door via the debt-driven commodity bubble.

However, with the mortgage-backed security market collapsing as the buyers realise that all those sub-prime bonds are the financial equivalent of toxic waste, I suspect that's going to come to an end shortly. If the banks can't sell on those mortgages, they're going to be far less willing to lend lots of money for overpriced houses. Without those big mortgages, there'll be far less easy money available to buy tat from China, and the demand for commodities and oil will drop.

That said, I'm wondering whether buying a house in Canada makes any sense if the world's supply of oil and gas is running out as many people claim; -40C winters might be a bit less appealing without heating.

Tableland

Have no fear Mark - like I mentioned earlier - if the Doha round fails Australia could well be invited to join NAFTA. If it does you could always come and work in Aus on one of those nifty NAFTA visas........

dbd33

I took some pictures en route. Crappy pictures from a moving car but all taken last night or this morning without deviating from the quickest route to the highway. Typical Toronto pictures, I could get much worse if I went to the city's ripped back side.

The first is the grass outside the Moss Park Armoury, men lay there in the sun drinking, injecting. My kids played hockey across the road and had early games so I know the men are there from 5:30am.

Second (ended up last in the thumbnails) Jarvis St in the afternoon, people start to gather around one of the many Salvation Army hostels.

Third, Jarvis St around 6:30am. This stick thin woman is still out there, she can't have made her quota. When the kids had swimming practise we'd get to the school around that time and, if it was raining, the hookers would be on the steps sheltering. In those days they had better teeth.

Lastly, men gathering around the Friendship Centre at about 6:30am. I guess there's free breakfast inside.

I think country life is turning me into Travis Bickle. Still, my point is that this city has a huge population of people on welfare and/or living in some form of state funded housing, many of whom beg on the streets and/or commit crimes for a living. We immigrants are mainly above dealing with such people because we have more money, much of which derives from the difference in housing values between the UK and Canada. If the values were the same UK immigrants would have the same status in society as at home and there'd be no point in emigrating.