Why? I say why not? City life isn’t exactly great, we currently rent inner city and our commute to work is great, takes me 10-15min. However it’s noisy, expensive and fairly dangerous. Last night for example someone shot up the KFC across the street:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Sh...megadrop_story
The outskirt communities aren’t always much better, buddy lives in Bridlewood and 6 cars on his street were broken into recently in one night. I’d rather raise kids in a quite secure community.
In Calgary it’s pretty hard to live 6 minutes from where you work and even harder to accomplish this when I work SE and the wife works in Airdrie. Like I mentioned from what I know so far the commute time may be very comparable to that of newer communities within the city. There are plenty of people I work with who live within the city but still drive 45min on an average day and close to 2 hours on days like last week. The extra kilometers will not add up to significant maintenance costs on our vehicles as they are cheap to maintain as it is. If I lived in Country hills for example I would still have to drive 50km per day for work, in Lyalta it would be 100km per day which is 13000km a year or half an oil change on my car ($50). Things like brakes will actually last longer and other parts will also be less stressed from eliminating most of the start and stopping you find within the daily city drive.
In addition a gas station and grocery store is being built in the community as well as a restaurant or two. Strathmore is 10min away for most things so when we do need to go into the city we’ll just make a day of it.
I get the trying things out first idea but it’s not really possible. I would never buy a house in the city right now if there was even a slightest chance of us not making a long term home of it. House prices aren’t exactly going up and with all the houses currently on the market it’s difficult to sell and after realtor and lawyer fees I’d loose my shirt. You also can’t rent in the community.
Honestly I love everything I can think of about living in this community, I’m just concerned about the daily drive to work, specifically in the winter. Before we put the offer in I’m going to make the drive during typical commute times and see exactly how it is.
Thanks all for the feedback.