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Montreal for both rentals and real estate is very affordable, Montreal is incredibly dynamic, vibrant, cultured, the economy is booming, and the city is growing faster now than it has in 50 years.
Yea, Montreal and Berlin are good picks internationally. I've had friends move to the latter in recent years. I also have a friend who lives out in Nagoya and cost of living versus quality of life there is great though it's not exactly booming when it comes to growth.
So here is a problem we seem to have. We don't really have a city that is livable (high QOL), affordable (low COL) and dynamic (economic growth). We certainly have cities that do well in one area, maybe two, but not all three. For instance San Francisco is livable and dynamic but ridiculously expensive.
Are these three fundamentally against each other? Is it simply a problem that we cannot develop technology to lower the COL for construction? If you can think of an area that has all three it must be incredibly small and mostly unknown.
This is a problem as people on the one hand purport to want to have affordable cities so that families, or the poor or whatever group we can think of can live there. But the only way that has been politically feasible of keeping COL low has been to develop sprawled out cities. However people don't like this from a QOL standpoint. Maybe we just can't have it all.
One issue I think I see here is this:
There's an unspoken assumption that anyplace that isn't predominantly walkable has a low QOL.
I would say that the city I was born and raised in, Kansas City, Mo., ticks off 2.5 of those boxes. Its COL is very reasonable and its QOL quite high. Its principal walkable districts - Downtown/the River Market, the Crossroads, Westport and the Country Club Plaza - have all seen a rise in population and activity, though Downtown is a laggard on the activity scale as of my last visit. Its dynamism trails most of the Sunbelt cities but is well ahead of the older metropolises of the Northeast and eastern Midwest. Its winters are colder than those on the coasts (save for New England), but not as long or cold as those in the Twin Cities.
But its walkable districts aside, it's a drive-everywhere sort of place, a tendency reinforced by its very low traffic congestion (one study I've seen lists it as having the lowest level of congestion-caused delays of any 1m+ metro in the entire Western Hemisphere). Its starter streetcar line is being extended south to the Plaza, grazing Westport in the process, but otherwise, its mass transit system is adequate but far from robust and not extensive enough.
But the fact that no one in this discussion has listed it yet as a candidate for hitting the trifecta suggests to me either the implicit bias I listed above or that general tendency of the coastal folk to overlook much of the country's interior. Katarina Witt, a Denverite, does not suffer from this defect for obvious reasons.
There's an unspoken assumption that anyplace that isn't predominantly walkable has a low QOL.
I would say that the city I was born and raised in, Kansas City, Mo., ticks off 2.5 of those boxes. Its COL is very reasonable and its QOL quite high. Its principal walkable districts - Downtown/the River Market, the Crossroads, Westport and the Country Club Plaza - have all seen a rise in population and activity, though Downtown is a laggard on the activity scale as of my last visit. Its dynamism trails most of the Sunbelt cities but is well ahead of the older metropolises of the Northeast and eastern Midwest. Its winters are colder than those on the coasts (save for New England), but not as long or cold as those in the Twin Cities.
But its walkable districts aside, it's a drive-everywhere sort of place, a tendency reinforced by its very low traffic congestion (one study I've seen lists it as having the lowest level of congestion-caused delays of any 1m+ metro in the entire Western Hemisphere). Its starter streetcar line is being extended south to the Plaza, grazing Westport in the process, but otherwise, its mass transit system is adequate but far from robust and not extensive enough.
But the fact that no one in this discussion has listed it yet as a candidate for hitting the trifecta suggests to me either the implicit bias I listed above or that general tendency of the coastal folk to overlook much of the country's interior. Katarina Witt, a Denverite, does not suffer from this defect for obvious reasons.
Plus, as MarketStEl himself put it—KC hits 2.5 of the points rather than three.
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