[koolba]

They’re clearly willing to pay and they put a premium on living in a congested ice box over actual food or what normal people would consider quality of life.

I see nothing wrong with this market at all. The reality is that there’s plenty of people willing to live in these apartments, often splitting the rent with roommates. The more people that do that, the more the rent goes up because now it’s acceptable to have two or even three incomes paying what used to be the rent for a one bed room.

The only way for the little guy to win this game is to not play. Screw those overpopulated metros and go live somewhere else.

[jjmarr]

Literally every city in southern Ontario is now a bedroom community of Toronto. There isn't anywhere else to move. Let's take London, Ontario, a city of 400,000 people 120 miles (200 km) from Toronto, Detroit, and Buffalo.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/london-ontario-real-es...

The median price of a single-family home is C$685k. This is one of the cheapest cities in Ontario.

If I "go live somewhere else", that means moving to Texas where I can triple my take-home pay as a software developer for a significantly lower cost of living.

Labour is not a perfect commodity that can be moved around. Once someone leaves Canada, they're probably not going to cut their earnings by moving back, even if we fix the housing crisis.

This has already happened with AI. Go look at Geoffrey Hinton's students and researchers at the University of Toronto.

[carlosjobim]

> If I "go live somewhere else", that means moving to Texas where I can triple my take-home pay as a software developer for a significantly lower cost of living.

That sounds great, to be honest. Why don't you do just that? Sounds like Canada deserves it.

[jjmarr]

85% of software engineering graduates from the University of Waterloo do so every year.

https://x.com/danluu/status/1351785083598893062

Anyone who can code is fleeing this country en masse and the government's response is to bring more people in from abroad to address the "skills shortage". This depresses wages further, because the government views us as interchangeable cogs in a machine.

This causes GDP per capita to shrink as we bring in several less-efficient people to do the work of one. GDP per capita has gone from over 90% of the USA in the 80s to 73% now.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-is-no...

I don't believe Canada deserves this. We're a first-world developed country that my ancestors spent centuries building that is actively reducing our living standards so we can compete against WITCH.

I visited the American Jewish History museum in Philadelphia recently, and they had a recreation of a flophouse from the 1920s with a 100 sqft bedroom in which a recent immigrant doing manual labour would live.

My classmates in the 2020s that are immigrants are paying most of their income to split that room in two.

I'd rather go to a museum in my country and tell my kids how much better their lives will be than mine. I want to give back to the community that raised me.

[piva00]

> Screw those overpopulated metros and go live somewhere else.

With urbanisation going up to 11 there are not many "somewhere else cheap to live" for many professions. People can't easily find a job at a place with lower rents because there's a reason it has lower rents: it's less desirable, has less opportunities, so on and so forth.

For the privileged class of office workers with remote jobs that's an easy solution, and one that I see many peers taking over time, for the rest of society it's not feasible. If you were a theater actor (or teacher), you can't go live in the middle of nowhere, you won't have many peers, you won't have many venues, companies, etc. to work with. Now apply that logic to many professions who need a community around (of other workers, of companies or customers) to do their work and you will realise that for the vast majority of people it's not feasible to flee expensive urban centres.

[zeroCalories]

So true, I love the market. Infact why don't we go harder into the market by deregulating housing construction? I think there's a lot of money to be made by bulldozing large parts of California and New York then putting up skyscrapers. Clearly, if the market will allow it, it's all fine.