Like many people, Paul Brooks fled the city for greener pastures during the pandemic. He jokes that now he has a nice rural view to admire while agonizing over why on earth he made the move in the first place. Living amid the forested hills of Hockley Valley north of Toronto, Brooks, a contractor, often finds himself confined in his car for close to four hours on weekdays, battling traffic commuting to and from the city for work.

A rising tide of opinion contends that challenges like this have steered large numbers of those who bolted from cities back into them, now that there’s momentum around returning to the workplace and regular life. 

There are also plenty who hold the opposite view, though, believing that the flood of people expected back in the cities post-Covid hasn’t materialized and that young families in particular are now leaving major centres in higher numbers than usual.

Priced out of urban areas as immigration continues

“Inflation stretched the delta of unaffordability much farther, such that many of those who traded their urban homes for suburban or rural dwellings are now finding themselves priced out of the urban neighbourhoods they came from,” says Re/Max Canada president Christopher Alexander. This means that many will have no choice except to stay put “until inventory rises and affordability returns to the market.” 

Statistics Canada has no definitive data on this yet for 2023 and was only able to tell REM that immigration remains the main driver for growth in large urban centres like Toronto and Vancouver. As such, “it’s fair to expect them to continue to grow as a whole, though whether this growth is still stronger in peripheral areas than their core in 2023 we cannot say yet,” the organization states.

Even in the past couple of years with Canadians moving around the country within and between provinces in unusually high numbers, “internal migration” out of Canada’s largest municipal centres didn’t have a significant impact on their population, according to BMO Capital Markets. 

Urban exit trend starting to reverse

All things considered, it’s fair to say that the exodus from Toronto and other big cities has “definitely slowed,” according to Jake Spelic, an area district vice president with U-Haul Canada.  “As things are shifting closer to normal, we are starting to see that trend reverse.”      

Leading Royal LePage agent from Vancouver, Adil Dinani, notes that the clients he’s seen return to the city tend to be those who’d moved so far off the grid that they’d run into a critical lack of amenities. Access to resources such as public transit, good schools, daycare and nightlife isn’t a given in rural areas.

Small-town life not meeting expectations

Re/Max Hallmark agent Jacqueline Pennington, located in a small rural community an hour east of Toronto near Cobourg, has seen a few key drivers of the trend back to the city, predominantly “the call to return to work in person.” 

Culture shock can hit hard in the country, observes Pennington. “Without anything other than a pizza joint open past 8:00 p.m., the quiet life of small towns can be sleepy. A common theme I’ve found is that the lifestyle is different from what people expected. They miss the entertainment, restaurants and ease of access to everything in the city.”

City dwellers buying a farm on a whim may have a particularly rude awakening.

“I recall eager millennial buyers asking me, ‘Who is responsible for maintaining all these trees?’” says Pennington. “They were shocked when I explained that it would be them.”

Affordability and extra space are what those moving away from cities are primarily seeking. But with the growing expense of living outside the city, they’re having to go further and further afield to find what they’re looking for. 

What happens when reality hits?

The gap between living in a city like Toronto and living outside of it, whether in a suburb or a small town, has closed, notes Toronto agent David Coffey, who’s with Bosley Real Estate. “The bargain you think you’ll find out of the city may not be worth it anymore.”

Families may choose to move deep into the country, or close to the ocean or mountains in another province. “People romanticize that life,” says Coffey. 

But he’s found that many eventually realize that both the weather and roads are bad and that they’ve wound up driving as much or more than when they lived in the city. “The commute is killing them,” Coffey maintains.

Or they get bored. A number of people living outside the city have told Vancouver realtor Tyler Burrows, of Oakwyn Realty, that they miss being able to walk to coffee shops and restaurants, and that the extra square footage they get having a suburban home isn’t worth having to endure the commute into Vancouver.   

“Sometimes, the head leads the heart,” maintains Steve Fisher, who moved back to Vancouver in 2022 with his wife and their two dogs after a year-and-a-half up the coast in Sechelt. “I loved living on the Sunshine Coast,” he says. But his wife “never managed to find the community she needed and missed the vibrancy of a larger city like Vancouver,” he explains.

Domenic Amatuzio, who left Toronto a year into the pandemic for the charming rural vibe of Prince Edward County, further east along Lake Ontario, took a job as a sous chef at a local brewery. So he’s avoided the dreaded long commute, the downfall of many who clear out of big urban centres. However, he’s found the nearby roads aren’t maintained anywhere near as reliably as in the city. 

“People looking to move here should come see it in January first,” Amatuzio laughs.     

He likes the area though and plans to stay put for now. But, he’s found that “being off the grid” can be isolating, with challenges running the gamut from unreliable internet to “wells running dry and stores either closing early or not being open at all in the off-season.”  

Amatuzio moved to the country because he thought it would be healthier and less expensive. In reality, the area is as pricey as anywhere else. “And since I have to drive everywhere, I’ve put on 10 pounds and my blood pressure has gone squirrelly.”

His appraisal of country living? “It ain’t Green Acres.”