Thinking of leaving Toronto? You’re not alone. The city’s soaring cost of living has been pushing young people out for years, and the pandemic has accelerated the trend.

According to Statistics Canada, the country’s two largest metro areas, Greater Toronto and Greater Montreal, saw a record outflow of people to nearby towns and cites between July 2019 and July 2020 ― with much of it taking place even before the pandemic shut down so much of city life at the end of last winter.

More than 50,000 people left Toronto for other parts of Ontario during that 12-month period, and ― hit hard by pandemic lockdowns ― the region now has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, at 10.7 per cent. Meanwhile, the average condo price (never mind a house) was above $600,000 in 2020.

High living costs and few job opportunities make the conditions ripe for an exodus. You can see it in the data ― falling condo prices in Toronto, and soaring house prices and rental rates in the nearby cities of southern Ontario.

So you may want to move fast, before these smaller cities find themselves in the grip of a housing affordability crisis ― something that may already be happening.

Some of these cities are considerably more likely to have job opportunities than others ― although that may be irrelevant to the new army of work-from-home employees. 

This means many people leaving Toronto will want to be within a few hours’ drive of the city. So in ranking the best cities to move to from Toronto, we limited ourselves to those places that are within 250 km or so of the big city, and then we weighed them by two factors: The job situation and house prices. 

We ranked about a dozen cities within the radius, awarding points for low house prices and low unemployment rates, and subtracting them for high house prices and high jobless rates. Here are the five best cities to move to from Toronto.

Continue to read on: HUFFINGTON POST