what the top five or ten cities on this list - the rest are throwaway - comprise is a list of cities that have aging populations that are going to open up cheap housing markets as they die and are going to collapse if they don't get younger people to move into them.

for years, younger people have been moving out of the suburbs and back into the big cities, leaving older populations behind in these small cities. it's a potential crisis in canada that could see the backbone of several provinces crumble, and the country fragment into city states.

so, they cook up some metrics and claim that these cities are attractive to millennials. but, the only thing that the demographic they're targetting is really going to want is the price, and they'll have to offset that with commuting, and all it takes - including the time. i quit a job in the suburbs once to take one at a lower pay downtown, because i hated all of the time i was wasting getting back and forth from work. price has to compete with the intangibles of existence.

i saw this coming, though, a few years ago. and, i'll tell you what's about to happen - the boomer housing bubble is about to burst. for that is what the cost of housing right now really is, a population bulge.

you can see it clearly in the data. the number of people increased dramatically after the war, creating a scarcity in housing, which pushed prices up. then, these boomers developed a kind of addiction in going through the charade of swapping overvalued assets with each other, creating these chains of inflated sales prices, to the point that it's become endemic in these imaginary equity numbers. even without the decoupling of wages from productivity, the population pressures on housing in the boomer era have been straight upwards - and it was going to have to crash, once they faced the reality of having to sell to a generation that doesn't have a mountain of inflated debt to swap with them. there was bound to be a dramatic market correction once boomers started selling to millennials on a regular basis, even if the kids or the banks are the ones offloading the property, in the end. but, endemic wage stagnation in the face of deindustrialization has made the bottom that much deeper, as the jobs that are being passed on to the millennial generation are broadly at a fraction of the salary of the ones they're replacing. the price drops could be so shocking that it does end up being the kids or the bank that does sell - if the kids don't move in.

this scenario is usually presented as a horror story for the older generation, but they've only lost what they imagined they had. the ones that got out early no doubt did will, but it was a swindle; when the correction hits, what will be lost is numbers on a page that should have never been there in the first place. fate may be cruel, but what was lost was always only a dream.

rather, i'd prefer to see it from the perspective of the younger generation, which may get a better opportunity at affordable house ownership.

....even if it's in guelph.

https://www.point2homes.com/news/canada-real-estate/millennial-cities-ranked.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.