[emge]

Some streets are spectacular, the majority are going to take decades to start changing significantly.... most places are nowhere near gentrifying and the rate at which they will is almost always overestimated by out-of-towners.

There are a few streets that are, though. Some friends of ours just bought a house off Ottawa North near Barton - both are artists and graphic designers moving in from Toronto. I'm not too familiar with that area, but it seems to be feeding off the general Ottawa-Street revitalization occurring further south on it.

Also, between Main and King east of Victoria, there's a lot of crap - but there's also some spectacular streets on which the occasional fixer-upper pops up for unbelievable prices - e.g. on Barnesdale or Fairholt or Garfield, which have some really nice places and families living there. Go further north on the streets around that area, though, or slightly west or east, and the story's totally different.

The Bayfront's is becoming quite a nice area, but there are still a lot of fixer-uppers. A 2-bed fixer townhouse sold there for 85k last year and detached 3-bed fixer-uppers are still around $100k-$140k. Not a lot of the older stock, though.