Hey, welcome to living in Calgary. I am Rob Vanovermere, your host. And in this video we’re going to give you the top ten reasons not to move to Calgary.
Okay, reason number one, it’s weather. Calgary does have some pretty nasty winters. I mean I’ve seen minus with the wind chill, no word of a lie, where you can barely go outside and start your car. Even when it’s plugged in your car barely starts. The roads are an absolute sheet of ice when it’s that cold.
Then they put sand on it to try to deal with it. But even then you can’t even believe the amount of accidents we see when it gets that cold because it creates this sheer ice on the roads when it gets that cold. So the weather can be so really unpredictable in Calgary in the wintertime and you have to be willing to deal with these long winters.
I would say if you don’t want that, probably not the place to come. I know absolutely everything there is to know about Calgary because I have been doing real estate in this town since 1999 and I have helped over 1000 people buy and sell houses here. I’ve helped people move here from other parts of Canada, other parts of the world.
I’ve worked with probably every nationality you can think of because this is a multicultural city. So I am a great resource and I hope you love this video. And if you do, what I want you to do is hit the subscribe button and of course you can also ring the bell and you can get notified when I do more of these videos.
And if you really like the video, you can like me. Okay. The second reason you may not want to move to Calgary is we don’t have the best walkable city. You know, when you compare it to other major centers like Toronto, Vancouver, where you’ve got communities where you can just walk to everything, we don’t have a lot of that in Calgary so you’re pretty well going to have to own a car.
In the transit system here it’s not the best. It is certainly not like you will see the go train in Toronto for example. That is a pretty sophisticated system. We just don’t have that here. So if you don’t like driving, you may not want to come to Calgary.
All right. The third reason you may not want to move to Calgary is if you really like nightlife and you like to do things after work. Well, we don’t have a big nightlife scene here. You don’t have this downtown core where there’s just lots happening and things you can go and see and do.
I know Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, have that downtown Calgary. Between you and me, it’s like a ghost town after 6:00. I mean, people just end up going home and hanging out with their partners and spouses and whatnot and just kind of hang out. Don’t get me wrong, there are some bars here, but it’s just not the kind of nightlife that you would expect to see in a major city.
Okay, reason number four you may not want to move to Calgary is the springtime when we have a lot of poplar trees in Calgary. And these poplar trees produce a lot of fluff. So if you’ve got a lot of allergies, you’re breathing all that fluff and it’s like blowing around the city.
You can see it’s kind of ridiculous. You see all this white pollen all over the place. And, uh, people are running to the drugstore trying to buy reactin and then we run out of reactin and everybody’s sneezing and coughing and everything else. So if you got a lot of allergies, this could be a problem for you in Calgary.
Reason number five, you may not want to move to Calgary. We get a lot of rain in the months of May and June, and we get a lot of rain. It brings insects, mainly mosquitoes. And I hate these things. I mean, I can tell you, I’ve mowed my lawn in June and there’s like this web of mosquitoes flying over my head.
Or if you’re taking your kids to play soccer, like, you gotta just load up on the insect repellent because there’s this mosquitoes. Everywhere, and they don’t really die off until late July. So you got to have a lot of insect repellent to be here, and you have to deal with these bugs.
All right, reason number six, you may not want to move to Calgary. Wildlife, you got to keep in mind we’re close to the mountains here, and close to the mountains, we have bobcats, we have cougars, we have coyotes, we have moose, we have bears. And these animals can come into the city.
Or even if you’re hiking in the mountains, of course you run the risk of coming face to face with one of these terrifying animals. So if you have pets, that can be a problem because, you know, some of these coyotes can go after your dogs. But if you’re terrified of these animals, yeah, Calgary could be a problem for you when it comes to that standpoint.
Okay, reason number seven, you may not want to get to Calgary. Headaches, I mean, these chinooks that drastically change the temperature and the barometer pressure is kind of crazy in this town. So I’ve had a lot of people that are taking headache medicine all the time for this with these massive change in temperatures.
So if you deal with migraines or you do suffer from issues with massive temperature changes, this could be a problem for you. And keep in mind, it’s so dry here, too, that if you don’t drink a lot of water, especially in the winter, you are going to get a lot of headaches here.
Okay. The 8th reason you may not want to consider moving to Calgary is the summers are short here. Now, it does stay light out until like 10:00, 10:30 at night, which is crazy because we’re so far north. But when the sun goes down or even when it gets cloudy because we’re close to the mountains, you tend to have to put a jacket on.
So you don’t really have those nice warm summer nights as much as you do in other parts of Canada where you can just hang out at 11:00 at night and sit in your backyard. You’re gonna have to light a fire in the backyard here just to stay warm. And in the winter it gets dark early.
I mean, December, we’re getting dark at about 4:30. So you have a really small amount of sunlight and some people don’t do well with that. If you really need a lot of vitamin D, this could be a problem. Might keep you away from Calgary. Okay, reason number nine, you may not want to consider going to Calgary in the summertime.
Lately we’ve had a lot of fires burning in BC and all that. Smoke can come into Calgary, and if you’ve got such, uh, issues with your lungs or you have trouble breathing, that kind of smoke, it really affects you in a negative way. This could be a problem for living in Calgary.
And I know there’s a lot of people that have complained about that smoke, and it, doesn’t last, you know, through the whole summer, but we’ve had some summers here where it’s gone on for over a month. The 10th reason you may not want to consider Calgary to live is for a major city in Canada.
We’re a long ways from the border. It’s 3 hours just to get to Montana. And once you get to Montana, there’s nothing there. You’d have to drive a long way just to get to any shopping. So the closest place to really shop if you want to get into the United States would be to go to Vancouver and then cross over and maybe head down to Seattle.
So that that can be a negative if you do like to visit the US a lot. On the flip side, we do have an international airport, so you can fly out, but it’s just not easy to drive out. All right, well, thanks for watching my Calgary, Alberta Channel, and I hope this has been informative.
And remember, anything you want to know about Calgary, whether it’s positive or whether it’s negative, I’m the resource for it. I know every inch of this town. I have sold real estate literally in every neighborhood in this city. There isn’t anything about Calgary I don’t know, so you just have to reach out to me.