sure, you can&#x27;t buy a house in Vancouver anymore on a normal salary, but nothing prevents you from living in Surrey, there are plenty of towers going up around the skytrain at Surrey central and King George where you can get an apartment for less than 200k<p>Yes, it&#x27;s not Vancouver city, and yes, it&#x27;s not a house, however via skytrain you can be downtown in a little over 40 minutes and get work done on your laptop in the meantime.<p>You don&#x27;t need a house to survive, it is nice, yes, but many many many millions of people live and bring up families in apartments in Europe, so it is definitely doable.<p>Of course it&#x27;s annoying to think that 12 years ago you could get a nice house in kits for 400k, or a 1000+ sqf condo downtown for 200k, but what can you do, same deal as buying a lottery ticket or joining a startup that makes it vs one that doesn&#x27;t. The mountains and nature and weather are available whether you live in vancouver or in one of the suburbs<p>Metro Vancouver is over 2m people, Surrey is the largest city in the metro area actually, even if Vancouver proper becomes a &quot;haven for the rich&quot; there&#x27;s plenty of other areas where one can live, the problem is that a lot of tech companies can&#x27;t seem to see beyond &quot;gastown is trendy&quot; or &quot;let&#x27;s go to yaletown&quot; or &quot;downtown is where it&#x27;s at&quot;, when they could easily set up in other skytrain-served area and attract more folks that don&#x27;t like the commute downtown.<p>It is true, what you could do 10-15 years ago, buy a house within 30 minutes of downtown on a normal salary is not possible anymore (just like it wasn&#x27;t possible back then to do that for a house in Point Grey) but it is still quite possible to live here, given the amount of immigration that the area is still getting.<p>Townhouses and condos in Surrey or Langley are still very affordable, the commute is annoying, but from what I hear from friends in the valley it&#x27;s not like traffic there is that great either, at least up here you can sit on the skytrain and get things done or read a book rather than be stuck in traffic and have no alternatives because there&#x27;s no decent public transit.