This one's the closest. Listed price is $168,900: https://www.realtor.ca/Residential/S...unswick-E2L1R7

And how much would this place go for in Hongcouver????? :)

Depends on location - based on the architecture it would probably be in the DTES...

Wow. I take it that, if you are a private or public sector professional living in St John, you are likely to be very well housed!

When I moved out east, I briefly considered Saint John, just because, damn, look at what you can get. But the thing about Saint John is that it really is depressed. Halifax, for example, has low housing costs compared to the country's big cities (and many medium-sized cities), yet still offers a reasonably healthy labour market and a wide array of cultural amenities.

Saint John, however, really is emblematic of the stereotypical "poor Maritimes". I like it in a lot of ways, but the employment options are much scantier there, and the city offers a lot less in other regards as well. Perfectly preserved Victorian mansions for $325,000, or $25,000 detached houses seem too good to be true, and they kind of are.

All that said, Saint John is like Hamilton in that its built environment offers a ridiculous amount of potential, should revitalization ever really take off. That's happening in Hamilton, partly due to proximity to Toronto, but Saint John is sort of down there at the bottom of New Brunswick, all by itself...it'll be a long haul to make it happen, though it's certainly possible.

Something I found interesting is that Saint John is one of the only cities in Canada that's planning, to some degree, for decline. In most municipal planning strategies, the default assumption is constant growth, and the projected population at any point in the future is greater than what it is today.

With Saint John's, they actually anticipate several more years of stagnation or population loss followed by a reversal, with the population at the end of the plan's timeframe anticipated as being higher than what it is now, but with the population in the middle of the timeframe being lower than it is now. This is for the city proper, though, not the suburbs, so the CMA population changes might not correlate.

"In theory" it's a great city, and has the potential to be one of the better small/mid-sized cities in Eastern Canada (again), but there just currently aren't many reasons for new people to move there right now. I could see it becoming a sort of hipster utopia (I guess in the same way that some people seem to view Hamilton) but there just doesn't really seem to be the critical mass of creative types there (a big and notable "scene") to attract a huge wave of new ones. Unfortunately their shipyard shut down a while ago (before the gov't shipbuilding bid, etc) it's kind of isolated in terms of transportation networks, there doesn't seem to be much growth in industry there (and I'm not really sure how much industry is left). If Maine ends up booming for some unanticipated reason, that would be a game-changer. A cross-Canada pipeline also would have been (Saint John actually has Canada's largest refinery), but that seemed unlikely from the start. UNB has been beefing up its presence in the city lately, and I think they are establishing a medical school there, but in terms of real numbers that won't make a huge difference.

I think if Saint John had been made the provincial capital it would probably be pretty similar to Halifax; if UNB had also located there, even more-so, and Fredericton would probably not even be in the province's 10 largest municipalities (and if Saint John had been significantly larger and more important, Windsor NS would probably have developed more, at Halifax's expense, bringing SJ and Hali even closer together in terms of scale and character). But unfortunately for Saint John, the lion's share of government and academic jobs are in Fredericton, and Moncton seems to have the momentum in most other sectors, and neither of these cities are particularly close to Saint John.

Nitpicking, but it should be noted that Hamilton has nothing like those spectacular residential and commercial streets that Saint John has. Hamilton has some neighbourhoods with terrific detached housing (see flar's photos here), but it lacks the Brooklynesque street walls that would really make the heart sing and actually provide it with the setting to become "Brooklyn."

Hamilton is really frustrating that way. Without that eastern seaboard interim zone that Saint John has you're left with a few dense parts here and there, but then across the street you'll have grass and 1960s commie-blocks or parking lots, or just generic detached housing.

Saint John has such wonderful heft in those blocks on the western half of the peninsula. Damn it, you look at Saint John and you wish to gawd it had become a mighty commercial port to rival Boston back in the day so that we'd really have something magnificent in this country outside of Montreal and Quebec City. Sigh.

(Of course I'm ignoring history and geography in my lament, specifically that of the St. Lawrence River...)

Well, there's Okotoks.

Yeah, that's true. Hamilton has a big collection of Victorian architecture, but mostly of more modest scale. Saint John really does feel like a slice of brownstone Brooklyn dropped onto a little peninsula in the Canadian north Atlantic. You could easily make a case for Uptown as the most architecturally impressive neighbourhood in Anglo Canada. Even its second-most urban neighbouhood, the old North End, is on par with Hamilton's urbanity. (It's basically a slum right now, but maybe not forever...)

Wow, and I thought I might be at the low end. OK, here's my submission, from an older section of central Moncton:

http://i.imgur.com/cw15K4L.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/rW87Zbp.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/d6sSSuk.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/X80gvDu.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/eRCy11f.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/tDGDbcu.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/NAKACGa.jpg

$250,000. And not a penny more.

I just street viewed St. John. How frustrating. I feel like if given SimCity-esque power over the central peninsula, I could turn around the finest built neighbourhood in Canada. The bones and key streetcorners are already there. It's just a question of infill and street furniture, signage, landscaping and the seawall.

Maybe I should apply for a Canada Council grant. Or we could all team up and do a Kickstarter. How much for the whole thing, I wonder?

Exactly. It's not close enough to any large, expensive city to attract said city's priced-out creative diaspora. Though if a big enough scene developed there it could become a sort of national artistic hub for those things--like a pre-gentrification Portland. (Or, maybe more realistically, it could just continue to decline and become more like Detroit, which has become an arts magnet because it's basically free to live in certain neighbourhoods.)

$318,000.

That Moncton house looks impeccable (although something really MUST be done about the wallpaper ;) ). On the assumption that it is three bedroom, two bathroom, and about 1800 sq ft (posted houses should include these details!), I am going to say $319,000. I expect that a brick version of it would go for around $425,000 or more here in Kitchener.

A good guess. It looks like this house has been nicely renovated on the inside and has a nice backyard. Unfortunately, there is a tendency in Moncton to prefer the suburbs over older stock residential neighbourhoods in the center of the city. A lot of this has to do with proximity to schools and ease of access to suburban malls and big box developments. Moncton has a strong car culture, and this serves as a disincentive to downtown living.

We're slowly turning the corner on this mentality, but the downtown suffered a major blow when the provincial government decided to move Moncton High School from it's home in a gothic revival building in the core to a spot in the far exurban fringes of the city.........

I will go a little higher and make my guess $269,000

Sorry, I should have given more details, though one of you is dead on.

Built in: 1911
Bedrooms: 4
Baths: 1
Square Footage: 1650
Detached Garage and 465sq metre lot

Well, MonctonRd should know.....

The no-prize goes to rousseau. :D

https://www.realtor.ca/Residential/S...unswick-E1C2G9

Good deal for someone and it really is a very charming house. Although I would have dropped to 299,000 had I known about the single bathroom. Again, a city where professionals, university professors and senior civil servants must be very nicely housed.