Calgary is now the third most expensive place to live in Canada*, is it growing massively, and it is rapidly becoming an unpleasant place to live for people who don’t like big city hassles. I am thinking about moving away from Calgary as I am becoming increasingly disenchanted with the lifestyle here, and I’m wondering how you go about making a decision like that.
I’m sure there are many people here who have moved away from a thriving metropolis because it changed too much, or their priorities changed - how did you make that decision? What factors do you weigh? People who have left, why did you leave? Were you happy with that decision? What would you do differently? What cautions would you give someone considering a major life upheaval like this?
*Calgary is very close to a million in population, and is experiencing a huge real estate boom.
Sounds like you have a good start on deciding to move away.
Make a list of pros and cons. If the cons outnumber the pros, start applying for jobs elsewhere and when you get one, move. Start saving money to pay for the move, and anything like deposits on utilities and a flat in your destination, and maybe some new furniture or work clothing, stuff like that.
Seriously, what jobs are you qualified for, and where are these available? I think that might be the limiting factor, unless you win the lottery or something.
Don’t count out looking overseas, either. What languages do you know? What ancestry do you have? You may have an ‘in’ somewhere.
Good idea to save, too. Unless you luck out with that highly-paid five-year consulting job in Dubai, and they pay all your moving expenses.
You may joke about Dubai, but living in Calgary, the home of Canada’s oil patch, if I got a job at an Oil and Gas company, it could be a possibility. But I don’t want to go there, anyway.
I’m a secretary who is just starting my own business doing landscape designing; my husband is a Construction Safety Officer. One option is to get a transfer with his company (they have branches throughout North America). My work is very transportable.
A list of pros and cons, eh? That’s just crazy enough to work. One of my big sticking points is that I really don’t know where I’d like to move to. I just know that this city is starting to feel too big for me.
My SO and I are in the middle of this very discussion …
We moved from a big place to a small place; now we’re looking at something in the middle. Before this grand experiment (when we lived in a very large city), we believed that it didn’t matter what was outside the house. Well, we rapidly discovered that you gotta go out sometime.
We’ve started this time by making a list of the things that should be in the hypothetical “perfect” living spot (culture, weather, crime - even as simple as having a gym close by) and have ranked them. There are some parameters that are “dealbreakers” (for example, I don’t do well with heavy pollution or a lack of Mexican food). And now, we’re searching - going through Chamber of Commerce files, websites like epodunk.com and homefair.com, etc. Oh, yeah, and jobs …
Don’t know if this helps, but it’s how we’re going about it after doing it once (and admittedly not knowing what we were doing).
BTW, do you own your house? Would it be worthwhile to keep it a while to get more out of the housing boom? Just curious.
How would you feel about trying life on the other side of the tracks? Move to a have-not province! My hometown of Halifax is quite lovely and a pretty good size (around 300K?) as long as you don’t mind that about half the population is Bay Street refugees.
I just saw some pictures of Dubai. Hundreds of big buildings are going up (warning: link has many large images). I think they want to turn themselves into the Hongkong of the Middle East before the oil runs out.
How adaptable are your landscaping skills? Could you do well suddenly having to design for, say, drylands if all the landscapes you had done were in the pine forest zone?
There’s the old sorting method used in selecting political parties: make a list of what you don’t want, ranked in order of loathing.
Do you have hobbies or interests that lead to connections?
I travel through Dubai every 4-5 weeks. If you think Calgary is bad, don’t even think about Dubai. I was there during the Gitex trade show in September. The hotel I was at was a 20 minute walk to City Center Mall. It was rather hot (you don’t know hot until you have been in Dubai during the summer), so I decided to take a cab. FYI, I can see the mall from where I got into the cab but there is a big highway in between. 2 hours later we arrive at the mall. The taxi driver tried every shortcut he knew and was banging on his steering wheel the whole way. I stayed in the cab just to see how long it would actually take. The cabs are cheap as they don’t really charge for time just distance. Oh, and the drivers speak better english than the ones in Calgary.
Once all those buildings are complete and people start moving in it will be absolutely horrible.
My wife and I have been trying to move to Hong Kong for a while now. Yeah, we know we’d live in a small apartment, but the time we spent there left us with fond memories. Highest tax rate is 15%.
Another choice would be Victoria, BC. But what would a person do there? I can’t imagine getting a job there other than as a consultant. Something I don’t want to be. And while Calgary is expensive so is Victoria. Plus higher taxes. Everywhere in Canada has higher taxes. And there is no potential for them to get any lower which could happen in Alberta.
If you’re from Alberta, you’ll end up in B.C. ( Half the province comes to my little corner of B.C each and every summer). But first, take a driving course, please.
Halifax would be just about the right size for me. The downside is that it is what, 3000? miles away from all our friends and family. I’ve never been there, though. I might love it. I was looking for a list of cities in Canada with populations around 300,000, and there aren’t many, and there certainly aren’t many in the Prairies, which is where I’d like to stay.
Good advice, Freudian. That is exactly what I want to avoid; dragging my husband away from his home city to a different one that neither of us likes much.
We do own our own home, so we stand to make a lot of money when we sell, but the down side of that equation is that if we stay in Calgary, we have to buy again, and that’s not going to be cheap.
I grew up in the San Francisco bay area, and after graduating, moved back for my first job. After about 6 years, I started to look into buying a place, and that’s what triggered my desire to leave. I was faced with the prospect of 1. a nice place with a horrible commute or 2. a horrible place with a nice commute. What really put me over the top was reading this article in the sunday paper about how, because of the boom of silicon valley, the freeways would always be playing “catch up” - would never get ahead of the volume.
So I looked around a bit, and ended up in San Diego (which is quite a large population center also, but didn’t grow quite as fast back then), where I went to school. And have no regrets. So I can certainly relate to wanting to move away from a place that has gotten too big/crowded.
Along the lines of the list of pros and cons, in particular, be sure to list the things that you will miss if you weren’t in Calgary. Big cities, for all their cons, do have some advantages. For me, I really noticed a big difference in the arts - particularly concerts. San Diego is pretty weak as far as shows. LA is only 2 hours away, but let’s face it, you really don’t want to have to go to LA unless you absolutely have to
So think about things peculiar to Calgary that you might miss, and be sure you’re okay with that (proximity to Banff/rockies ?, etc.)
I looked at it as kind of a two step thought process 1. Do I really want to leave ? and 2. where should I go ? Once you get settled with #1, then focus on #2 (if you’re not settled on #1, then you may do a lot of flailing on #2). And I would say take your time with deciding on #2 -where to end up. Do a lot of research, see if you can talk to people who are from the desired destination, etc… Find out the bad as well as the good about the place. And, of course, be sure to visit if you’re not already familiar with the place.
I met this family on a plane one time, and they were doing this type of investigating. They were tired of the housing prices and rat-race of San Diego, and were checking out 3 other places as potential places to relocate to. They were checking out schools and jobs and housing, as well as overall “atmosphere”. I thought it was pretty cool, and a good way to go about such a change.
I’m considering moving to High River. For me it’s only an extra 5 minute commute to work and it’s a nice drive in the country rather than a crappy crowded city commute. Real estate out there is still reasonable compared to Calgary although it’s probably set to start booming there too. Someone told me last week High River is among the fastest growing communities in Alberta.
Anyway I’m taking this year to renovate my tiny place a little more then decide if I like it enough to stay longer or sell it and get a nicer place for less money in High River. I don’t think you and el hubbo will have such a minor difference in commute time since I work at the South end of Deerfoot.
I’ll be watching this thread for all the usual great doper advice. Hope you don’t mind me horning in on the wisdom
Well, it’s nowhere close to 300,000 people, but I grew up in Red Deer and really love the city. Its big enough to have all the amenities, but still small enough that it doesn’t feel like a Big City. Right now I believe they’re somewhere 80,000. Plus it’s close enough to both Calgary and Edmonton that you can easily make a trip to either city in the morning and be back in the afternoon without feeling rushed.
Dammit, Gut, how many times do I have to warn you?
Just kidding. Glad to see all the Calgary Dopers haven’t disappeared. I’m sort of thinking about a small town near Calgary as well as Red Deer as options, but as Freudian said, you still have to go outside. I don’t know if we can gear down enough for a small city or town.
Let’s see, Midnapore was annexed quite a few years ago (there are quite a few communities south of it now, I believe), and Cochrane is more expensive than Calgary proper, and Okotoks is about the same price as Calgary. Airdrie might still be an option when we’re ready to go, but it’s not much cheaper than Calgary at this point, either. The bedroom community would have been a good way to go a couple of years ago, but I’m not the first person to get that idea. It won’t be long until Red Deer is a bedroom community.
One of my big sticking points is that I really don’t know where I’d like to move to. I just know that this city is starting to feel too big for me.