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Comment by wk_end | Hacker News Reader

You say "now" as though it's ever not been the case. These comparisons do a poor job of taking into account cost-of-living and quality-of-life; it's simply not the case that you're better off in Montgomery than Toronto.

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The median wages for Toronto and Montgomery are actually quite similar:

Toronto: $84k CAD ($58k USD)

Montgomery: $55k

The person living in Montgomery can easily afford a house and a middle-class life. Can the person in Toronto?

Would I rather live in Toronto personally? Yes. But on a median salary, no way.

https://www.city-data.com/income/income-Montgomery-Alabama.h...

https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/9877-City-...

> The person living in Montgomery can easily afford a house and a middle-class life. Can the person in Toronto?

Of course not. But a person living in New York City - making the much higher median household income of 75K USD - also can't afford a house or a middle-class life there. And yet across almost every metric New York is considered a better place to live with higher quality of life than Alabama.

> also can't afford a house or a middle-class life there.

So can you compare cost of living between NYC and Toronto and does the difference in median account for COL difference ?

Would be interesting to hear some first hand experiences from people who lived in both or similarly comparable US/Canadian cities. I was under the impression that Chinese investment in Canadian real estate really destroyed the housign market. I feel like the growing popularity of investing in residential real estate is a global phenomena but some markets are more exposed to some effects than others so it's possible to get some intuition on what impacts it.

I have lived in both. It's easier to afford a Canadian home, despite their price, especially in Montreal but even in Toronto, compared to NYC or SF, for the median person. The median household income in NYC is ~80k, vs ~95k in Toronto.

Canada is much much more geographicly concentrated than the US.

Toronto is definitely cheaper than NYC. However Toronto represents a WAYYYY higher percentage of Canadians than NY does.

Rough numbers.

GTA population ~7 million

NYC population ~8.5 million

By representation GTA represents 10x the amount of the country that NYC does.

Major cities being unaffordable in Canada pretty much means Canada is unaffordable.

The same case is not true in the US

If you're going to use the GTA @ 7M (6.2 according to wikipedia[0]) you should perhaps use Metro NYC @ 23.5M[1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City

That's a fair correction, but it is still approx 3x the proportion of the population.

Edit: actually I take that back the metropolitan NY area seems to encompass a much larger area than the GTA and goes across multiple states.

Sure, but on the other hand that's just as true for income in the US, the disparity in average income between major cities and the rest of the US is even sharper than it is in Canada.

Yeah, you're probably - in most regards, depending on various things - better off living in NYC than Toronto (having lived in both). But that's at least a conversation worth having, a comparison worth making. Comparing Canada to the poorest places in America like the person I was replying to was solely on the basis of average wealth only makes sense if you've never been within spitting distance of either.

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