Odd to see my hometown here on HN, though many HNers are from here. Calgary has some unique issues -- the major ones being that the politics of the province are brutally toxic and this has halted and even reversed a lot of gains we made in the last decade trying to turn it around.
Oil and gas dying is part of the problem, but ask many new grads from local universities why they are leaving and the answer is mainly that this is just not the place for them. That's a terrible sign for the future.
The comment by julianlam elsewhere in this thread reminded me of a time I toured a local startup's office who had "reclaimed" an executive level of a previous oil and gas company. The entire floor was decorated like a Roman Emperor's quarters and the boardroom table itself was worth somewhere north of $200k (possibly as much as half a millon).
Alberta has always been boom and bust, ever since oil was first discovered. There was an old bumper sticker from the 80's "Give Alberta another oil boom and I swear I won't waste it".
Office space vacancies in Calgary are nothing new. The economy will recover, people will forget the hard times, new buildings will go up and we'll do it all over again.
Back in the late 1990's/early 2000's it had a tech boom feel to it. Newly graduated engineers and geologists making the equivalent of $200,000 at 22. A friend from high school dropped out of his 2nd year of university because he could get a job paying $100,000 right now. Plenty of new vehicle, boats and new construction.
The Calgary-Edmonton corridor is one of the wealthiest areas in Canada. Alberta had the highest level of in-migration for a long time.
And keep in mind oil is now at $80/barrel and climbing. Those sweet, sweet oil royalties will be flowing into gov't coffers soon enough.
I've been in Alberta my entire life and seen the boom and bust cycle (partially from inside oil and gas software companies), but this cycle in particular is different. While I have been very successful in my life as an Albertan (two sweat exits so far, one more likely), it has been entirely because I sought work and built startups remotely from 2006 onward in other regions.
There's no guarantee the economy will recover at this point, and if it does, the likelihood of hitting the 2008 highs is vanishingly small.
There's no plan and has never been a plan to manage the resources of the province, so even the hint of a boom will distort wages up and down the ecosystem for a short period, followed by the waves of layoffs once that hint disappears and massive damage to every industry in the province.
I joined the board of the Alberta tech ecosystem for a term in the late 2010s while angel investing locally, and the picture was dismal but there were sparks of a revival. The current government that took power a few years ago completely ignored the new reality of the province and stomped on the ashes of the ecosystem.
Alberta is unfortunately heading towards Detroit-level dysfunction. There will still be activity, but the Alberta of the past is gone forever.
The only hope Alberta has is to switch government tracks and spend a real decade rebuilding from the continual societal damage that energy has impacted on it. And I'm not even talking about the environment yet. There is a real risk that Alberta will hollow-out and become little more than a slightly richer Saskatchewan.
As someone that grew up very close to Detroit, I’m afraid your analysis will be right. Sometimes you stop going from boom to bust to boom, and you just stay at bust.
At lest I hope Albertans will get enough transfers from the fed to run decent medical and education systems, I wouldn’t wish on anyones children the things I’ve seen young people in Detroit have to live through.
IMO, Detroit is at the peak of a boom cycle at the moment. Parks being filled out everywhere, Gilbert is in the middle of constructing his opus, grand central station is almost done(!), even the Illitch's are slowly building out district Detroit and fulfilling their obligation. The biggest problem at the moment for the mayor is deciding who to rain Biden bux on. Crazy to think about
Interestingly I found out yesterday that a fairly large tech conference plans to hold its North America event in Detroit next year. In all my time in the tech industry, I have never seen or heard of a tech event, except for maybe some local company thing, being held in Detroit.
I live an hour away from Detroit and drove a friend into the city a couple of years ago to show her around. At some point she said something like "This city looks normal, like any other city. I can see living here." Then I drove her off of Woodward, one of the main thoroughfares that's been rebuilt and looks great. Within about two blocks going perpendicular to Woodward the scenery changed into what people think of Detroit. So you can have a conference and it will be just fine for those visiting. Just stay within the pretty area, which is coincidentally where the police patrol all the time.
Where I live in the northeast US, it's pretty much the pattern with a lot of old industrial and/or port small cities. There's maybe a couple handfuls of gentrified blocks with restaurants, twee shops, entertainment venues, etc. Go a half dozen or so blocks and things get sketchier or at least a lot more rundown, albeit not historical Detroit levels.
The show is watchable btw. for the somehow cyberpunky feeling. Unfortunately canceled after 1 season only, in spite of favourable reviews. Strange.
Anyways, the most memorable thing for me was the part where the protagonist hops into his self-driving e-car to commute from the gated community he lives in, to work in downtown.
There is a sequence where it zooms out, to behind the car and then upwards, like filmed from a quadcopter, or so.
And then you see all the nice trees next to the highway are just fakery, hiding the ghettos next to it, by holographic walls :-)
> Office space vacancies in Calgary are nothing new. The economy will recover, people will forget the hard times, new buildings will go up and we'll do it all over again.
This mentality is why the current recession that started in 2015 hasn't turned around yet. The major oil and gas companies aren't coming back this time. It's time for the city to invest in something else instead of pandering to an industry that will drop them like a bad habit the moment the barrel drops below a certain price.
Tech can always an option. I mean we are entering WFH being the normal so office spaces aren't exactly what is required but once you start building Tech everything comes along with it (schools, stores,tech law firms etc) that supports Tech and in general people move where the money is.
In addition to higher extraction costs:
1. Alberta oil doesn't get the $80+ price you see quoted on the news. Although the major price gap has narrowed dramatically it still sells at a significant discount due to type and location.
2. Access to refineries and market is a real... challenge (to put it mildly). There has been huge opposition to expanding pipeline transport, some of it genuine (Environment, Culture) and some of it driven by self-interest ($$$). I don't want to start this debate but the result is we're still using a lot of fossil fuels right now, so (a) it's more expensive, (b) it's increased dangerous transportation by rail and (c) it's increased reliance on imports from some pretty nasty places in the world.
The funny thing is I moved to Calgary in the early 2000's when oil was well under $50/bbl and the environment was one of unbounded optimism and potential. When oil hit the same price a few years ago on the way down the would have thought the world ended.
> The funny thing is I moved to Calgary in the early 2000's when oil was well under $50/bbl and the environment was one of unbounded optimism and potential. When oil hit the same price a few years ago on the way down the would have thought the world ended.
Because the province ran out of the easy to extract oil and had to move to bitumen extraction which requires a much higher price of oil to be profitable.
Oil sands need the price of oil to be in the area of $100+ a barrel to be profitable.
Those are numbers that I recall being bandied about in the press when the oil sands were being developed.
I did a search for some actual numbers and they seem to be all over the place depending on the year, the type of bitumen converters being used, the age of the facility and the actual source. Oil industry numbers were about $20 a barrel less than the numbers I was seeing from investment firms.
I suspect that the numbers I was referencing were for new facilities being built back in 2015 or so. There was a lot of talk about new facilities being put into operation but that was when the price of oil was stratospheric.
Those numbers would have been higher than older facilities or upgraded facilities.
$70/barrel was the last number I heard 3-4 years ago. It's likely around $100 now due to higher operational costs. It's really hard to move oil in Canada.
It has more to do, I believe, with the cost of extraction and then processing the bitumen into a form that can be transported. It is quite energy intensive to do
I am no economist, but my understanding is that Alberta's oil sands must be extracted via fracking, which is expensive and only profitable when oil prices are high. That there is lots of oil available is besides the fact if it is no longer economically feasible to extract it.
This quality of the oil makes Alberta extremely sensitive to pricing shenanigans OPEC plays every once in awhile.
A couple years back when oil prices were artificially low, it was due to OPEC pricing oil well below even their cost, purely to drive other oil producers out of the game.
You are conflating a couple of things. Oil sands extraction is completely different from fracking. But, you did get the basic essence right in that oil sands extraction is quite dirty and expensive.
Fracking is actually a reasonably cheap way to extract additional oil from more conventional wells. That happens in Alberta, also.
The economics of it have to do with the massive amount of earth moved, and the relatively low amount of oil recovered per unit volume... and the work needed to be done to restore the mine afterwards.
The above added costs as well as the challenge of getting it to refineries. Lack of pipeline capacity to the coast (particularly Texas) is a big factor too.
> Oil and gas dying is part of the problem, but ask many new grads from local universities why they are leaving and the answer is mainly that this is just not the place for them. That's a terrible sign for the future
I am a young guy in Calgary and from Calgary. More than half my high school classmates are gone. Packed up to Vancouver or Toronto, with a few stateside.
Most came back after university for a bit, but then departed.
I had the same experience, nearly all the people I knew from high school left Calgary/Alberta. Including myself. The few people who stayed work in oil and gas.
Also from Calgary and just graduated, all of the people I knew from my group have moved to the states. Not really sure what I’m doing here but I enjoy my job so I don’t think I’ll move anytime soon.
This is true a lot of places though. The minute people finish high school or post secondary they leave.
I guess the difference is most people are moving from smaller places to cities for work and Calgary in theory should be a city where people would want to stay.
I left Alberta (Edmonton) in 1996 for much the same reasons. Moved to Toronto to take part in the .com thing. It's an ongoing cycle and seems to get worse on the downside of every bust.
Sometimes I imagine going back, because my elderly parents are there and my brother is there and I still have lots of friends there. But I can't imagine transplanting my children into that province.
I usually think of politics as a country-level issue, so it's hard for me to understand your point - can you elaborate on how does "toxic politics" on a city level look like that would make me not want to live there?
Poor quality of municipal services caused by e.g. waste and corruption; or something entirely different?
You're missing a level with this - the provincial government is the issue. If you're American, think of how Florida has been dealing with COVID or how Texan electricity policies have affected things lately - it's that sort of thing. The provincial government launched us into the #1 COVID spot in Canada (we were competing with some of the worst America states for a while) and they have consistently doubled down on bad bets and bad policies focusing on what used to be rather than accepting the new reality that Alberta needs to start planning for the future.
They likely mean Alberta provincial politics, which are kind of a mess. The current provincial government has done poorly with the COVID situation, and has spent as much effort battling cartoons on Netflix for being too "anti oil & gas" as anything.
Municipal politics aren't toxic in Edmonton and Calgary, they've largely managed to avoid the partisan divide that has poisoned discourse at the provincial level.
Canada is a highly federal country. In some ways even more so than the US. The political situation differs a lot between provinces, and the provincial governments have a lot of power.
And Alberta has essentially been a one party state under conservative rule for the last 50+ years (minus one 4 year term where a nominally left wing party took power by "fluke" because of a feud/split in the conservative vote). Every position of consequence there is connected to the conservative party, which is connected in turn to the oil and gas industry.
I grew up in Calgary, and after spending the last 14 years in Toronto I have decided to move back.
Income taxes are way lower in Alberta than Ontario; moving my remote-ok tech job to calgary was equivalent to getting a five-figure raise.
Cycling in Toronto is a life-threatening activity, and Calgary has something like 150km of paved urban pathway.
The politics are toxic in both places.
Calgary is just quieter and I like that. I’m sick of listening to construction, sirens, street car clattering, and apt hvac systems.
The water in Calgary looks appetizing - I spent a lot of time in the outer harbour in Toronto and am acutely aware of the water quality advisories.
The shoreline of Toronto’s harbour front is ugly as sin. Chunks of the Gardiner is falling on peoples’ cars, and is a source of horrible, dementia-inducing noise pollution. Anyone with a balcony in Fort York or City Place probably used it for the first time during the pandemic, and otherwise is just their storage locker.
Calgary has a stunning river that glows with mineralized rocky mountain water, and you can walk or cycle along it for exercise because it isn’t so oversubscribed as the pan am path.
Transit is terrible in both towns but living on the subway was great.
I can afford a 1700sqft inner city calgary home with a garage and a yard for the price of a 900sqft 2bed downtown toronto condo.
The recreation opportunities in Calgary are year round, but in Toronto I felt like the onot things to do in the winter were restaurants and the ago.
The food scene in Toronto is amazing. I miss sushi. The music scene too. But Calgary has world class examples of all this, and this stuff is a lower priority than it once was.
Everything is 8 minutes away from me in Calgary. Try getting anywhere in 8 minutes in Toronto, what with the choking traffic, and the fact that all your friends have to move to orangeville and whitby because of rising prices.
Both cities have incredible energy. I was in calgary for the red mile, and at yonge and dundas when the raps won.
> Cycling in Toronto is a life-threatening activity, and Calgary has something like 150km of paved urban pathway.
Calgary has over 1000km of paved urban pathway. I'm the creator of a small webapp called yycpathways.ca where you can sync your Strava up to a map of Calgary pathways. As you bike/run/etc the pathways, it will "Pac-Man" away the path and just show you places you haven't been before. Two people have completely covered all the pathways using my app.
But if you leave it to actually go somewhere, cycling is still a life-threatening activity.
While in the video he compares the infrastructure provided in a Norway town compared to similar ones in Finland and Canada, he doesn't touch on the underlying financial situations in the three countries. In summary, Norway is loaded while Canada and Finland are not. And that's because Norway has drilled hundreds of billions of dollars of liquid oil over many years that Finland and Canada do not have.
Canada has that, along with low population density. Ok, about 6 times the population and only 2.5x the oil production, but other resources too (we can actually grow stuff even).
We just prefer the colony model of letting the profits go to anyone but the local government.
Norwegian oil is vastly cheaper to extract and deliver to willing customers than Canadian oil sands. Canadian oil requires prices to be close to $100 a barrel to break even.
It requires a lot of energy to extract, but when you’re the extractor of that energy in the first place, your costs ride up and down as your selling price does.
There have been a number of times when I was cycling in Calgary on roads where there was no bike path but not doing anything dangerous, and people slowed down their trucks (because that is what everyone drives in Calgary) to shout at me to stop cycling or get off the road.
A while back I wanted to create something similar that'd help me ride every path and side streeet here in Boulder, CO, but it never went anywhere. I especially like the Pac-man idea for unexplored paths!
I miss the food in Vancouver and I wasn't even that much of a foodie. I miss the more diverse population. I really miss Commercial Drive (quiet sob)
But we moved because of house prices. All of the amenities of Vancouver were great but we couldn't actually afford to live there. Its the same reason I don't live in San Fran. I had the opportunity to do so and would have loved to but the prices were insane.
When we first moved I was a bit worried because I would see people in Calgary complain about traffic congestion and traffic noise and then when I finally settled in I wondered what the heck they were even talking about. Even on a bad day it is still much quieter here than Vancouver.
After a certain age the food and the music and the theatre isn't as important.
The rivers are great though and driving down 14th into the core is a nice view.
It's cold to very cold from Nov 1 to April-ish with occasional Chinook breaks. If you can live somewhere else for those five months, they are the worst for sure.
The weather has been rather weird lately. The summer was very hot and smokey. Who knows what winter will be like.
I grew up in Northern BC so I don't mind the winter. It gets cold for a few weeks but is otherwise bearable.
You get an actual spring here which is nice. Lots of new growth and green things. It is an actual dramatic change which Vancouver doesn't have.
Despite the snow I would never want to be in Vancouver again in winter. The clouds are over your head all the time. It feels oppressive. Winter here has lots of light and sky. And you never get that brown leaf mush stuck on your shoes like you do in Vancouver.
Can't speak to outside of Calgary, but as long as politics is toxic in most places, reason why I stay here even though I could make more elsewhere is cause I can actually be a single guy and afford a decent place in Calgary.
I know married families in Toronto who individually make more than I do and still are struggling to come up with money for a freaking condo. That's insane.
The less than stellar transit and dead downtown scene notwithstanding.
I’m making the exact same move and for the same reasons.
Toronto has gotten so much more expensive in the years that I’ve lived here. I’ll miss the restaurants and the Island, but it’s going to be so amazing to have some space
>Income taxes are way lower in Alberta than Ontario; moving my remote-ok tech job to calgary was equivalent to getting a five-figure raise.
How did you get to the lower income tax amount, given that it would appear from the official Canada Revenue Agency website figures[0] that provincial income tax seems generally higher in Alberta than in Ontario - especially the first 45k where the Ontario rate (5.05%) is just over half of the Alberta rate (10%). But even in the highest marginal tax bracket, Ontario seems to top out at 12.15% while Alberta tops out at 14%.
So your statement about income tax savings seems difficult to reconcile with the income tax charts without some other explanation.
> Income taxes are way lower in Alberta than Ontario; moving my remote-ok tech job to calgary was equivalent to getting a five-figure raise.
This is completely false.
Albert’s income tax rates are:
10% on the first $131,220 of taxable income, +
12% on the next $26,244, +
13% on the next $52,488, +
14% on the next $104,976, +
15% on the amount over $314,928
Ontario’s income tax rates are:
5.05% on the first $45,142 of taxable income, +
9.15% on the next $45,145, +
11.16% on the next $59,713, +
12.16% on the next $70,000, +
13.16% on the amount over $220,000
Sales tax is lower in Alberta (5% be 13% in Ontario), but income tax, especially on the first $100,000 is significantly higher.
I was in a relationship with an Albertan between 2014-2016, and moved to Edmonton from Europe in early 2015 (had flown over a couple of times in the prior year).
Even though the city was marketed as the "fun" city with all its events and festivals, I found it to be remarkably dead looking (architecturally cold concrete downtown, McMansions and overdeveloped cookie cutter cul de sacs everywhere).
Then we took a trip to Calgary for a couple of days, and I saw an even less appealing place.
Don't get me wrong, these places were filled with nice people, many which I miss having contact with.
But I would not have been able to settle there permanently (architecturally cold cities, extreme overconsumption, focus on fossil fuels and more played a role).
Edmonton is a bit of a bipolar city. Yes lots of sprawl and McMansions, quite blue collar, bleak winter weather, anemic nightlife. Deadmonton.
But also, a fantastically beautiful river valley runs through it with vast green parks all around. Summer festivals that are quite nice. Quite sunny, even when it's cold. Some neat corners and neighbourhoods. A distinct culture of its own, some good restaurants. And politically far more progressive than the rest of the province.
Honestly, if Alberta was just Edmonton, I'd move back. I grew to hate it in my 20s, but I miss a lot about it and in my 40s when I visit I quite enjoy myself.
yet Edmonton itself is only the 33rd largest city in NA. As someone who grew up in a dull commuter suburb and hated every minute of it, this ratio of mall size to population is not inspiring.
Having a large indoor area for people to congregate and entertain themselves in a location with very long and cold winters might not be comparable to having one in a location with milder weather.
I did my PhD from the University of Calgary. The university is great, especially in my field, but the rest of the city is just "dead". There is no life, huge sections of the city just a ghost town, the cold. I am happy I never have to go back there again.
> Calgary is now searching for ways to fix a problem that has left the city’s downtown – which already had a reputation as a lifeless collection of skyscrapers filled with people who clear out at the end of every workday
The situation isn't unique to Calgary. It is the same in a lot of other urban centres (like Oakland) where there was no development focus on anything other than head offices and high rises.
Compare Calgary to Vancouver (I live in C and spent 20+ years in V) where there was some effort to make the downtown a more livable space. I think the downtown here in Calgary is ghastly. Loud. Ugly. Who would want to spend any time in it?
I used to walk around downtown Vancouver all the time. Never do that here.
For decades the governments running Calgary, and Alberta, have not really given a shit about anyone other than large businesses (and their campaign funding) and those businesses have done what they normally do and moved elsewhere once things got tough or they got a better deal.
And, as usual, taxpayers and residents are left with the remains once the party is over and businesses have moved on.
In this case the city has an unliveable downtown filled with skyscrapers no-one wants to move into.
Having lived in all those places as well and others. I think Oakland has some very unique problems that Calgary doesn't. Namely that it has historically had a high crime rate (I was in a conference called and watched a drive by with about 15 shots fired off in midday - granted this is 4 years ago but still).
Calgary has a lifeless core and the worst urban sprawl in america but it's also because Calgary is wicked cold - the plus 15 (an above ground network walking between office buildings throughout the core for cold winter days) takes a lot of the foot traffic off the streets making it tough for street level businesses and the quality of produce/food is pretty bleak in Alberta unless you love beef and beets.
Vancouver never gets cold so you can literally walk there all year around and has a vibrant food scene and has geographical constraints limiting outward development.
Im not defending Calgarys lack of vision and innovation but they are dealing with completely different market dynamics (boom and bust) and environment.
In terms of tax payers, Alberta has the lowest tax across the country, not sure how much of it really falls on the tax payers but I'm curious about that.
All in all agree with most of your points, just expanding some of the thoughts.
The crime rate is definitely a issue and one I wasn't familiar with. I was staying in a hotel just off downtown once and the area looked like the set of a zombie flick after 6pm.
> Im not defending Calgarys lack of vision and innovation but they are dealing with completely different market dynamics (boom and bust) and environment.
They are but at no point has anyone ever tried to address those problems. It was working and the money was coming in so people were happy.
Nothing that Calgary and Alberta is going through now is novel or unforeseen. The boom-bust cycle. The dreadful downtown. People could see the fan and the giant pile of shit but no-one thought it was worth planning for it
> All in all agree with most of your points, just expanding some of the thoughts.
Actually San Francisco has the best weather in the world (very subjective). Agree, there are many other factors at play. Montreal is a very old city though - it was built before industrialization (ie go see the old port).
I'd say that dead downtowns after hours are more the norm than the exception in a lot of cities. Indeed, I can think of cities that do have a fair bit happening overall and their financial districts and similar are still pretty dead once people go home. For example, no one would probably say Boston didn't have a lot happening after 5 but the actual financial district is pretty empty.
We'll see what happens given the dynamics of a lot of office work going forward. Most people don't want to live in a city apartment per se. They want to live somewhere with easy access to entertainment, restaurants, etc. If there's nowhere to walk to, there's little reason to live somewhere walkable.
Am I incorrect in thinking Vancouver’s downtown is still extremely low density relative to Calgary’s downtown? And I understand it was only fairly recently that Calgary approved residential / multi-use zoning units core?
As @katbyte mentions, Vancouver downtown is very dense.
The city had a very progressive urban planning department until about 2007 or so and it shows.
I am not as familiar with the downtown as it exists now but the downtown was, when I lived there, very different than almost any downtown I have been in in North America with the possible exception of San Fran.
Downtown LA has its own (serious) problems, but one of its real successes is the transition over the past 20 years towards having greater integration of local communities, amenities, and nightlife. In the 90s it was a ghost town after 7pm, and now most neighborhoods have a bustling dining and entertainment scene that supports diverse local and small businesses.
I had the rare opportunity to visit Encana's offices in the Bow a number of years ago... Their offices really embodied the "live large" aspect of oil & gas.
As the founder of a small company that hadn't yet turned a profit, I was suitably impressed. Sad to hear they no longer even occupy the space.
On the other hand, their tech scene blew me away. Polar opposite of Toronto's "network first, friends later" attitude. Startups were helping each other out as a matter of course, whereas it always seemed like a competition in TO.
Calgary is very much a city where people would come from all over to make money because there was lots of work available, high salaries for unskilled people and even higher salaries for skilled.
I moved here in 2017 and frankly it's shocking how much different the city is now from the stories people tell me what it was before.
It's shocking the number of layoffs I have heard about since I moved here. I'm surprised the city hasn't seen a massive exodus of people unable to find work.
I moved to Calgary in 1997. At this point, I’d kill to say I was an infant, but I was already an adult. At least I was a young adult??
I remember the weekend I drove out to find a place to live. It was early July and I was looking to rent for September 1. There was nothing available. I don’t mean there was nothing in my price range or there were places, but they were at the corner of crack rock and gunshot wound. There was nothing…
Sunday morning, I called my boss to tell her that I was really worried I wouldn’t be able to find a place. I drove back to Regina Monday without even looking at a place. By Tuesday, she talked one of her friends into renting me a room in his house and I couriered a year of rent cheques to him without even seeing the place.
Six months in, I started looking for an apartment. I lucked out, found a one bedroom and was so damned happy that I rented two places for two months. Nobody in Calgary was even remotely surprised that I’d pay rent on two places - rather, they were surprised that I only rented two places for two months.
Work wise, my company wasn’t even that big, but we couldn’t find enough space for all of us in one building so we were spread out over parts of six floors in four buildings. I liked working there, but if I ever had a bad morning, I could have walked out, made a half dozen calls, walked to my friend’s record store on 17th and had six job offers by the time I made it back downtown. Some of my friends who interviewed there had final questions like “Can you start now? No, what about later this afternoon? Okay, tomorrow? What if we pay you a two week bonus?”
Every eight to twelve years Calgary goes through a boom and bust cycle. This has been happening forever. There are years where everybody's moving to Calgary and buying rolexes and years where petrochemical engineers are driving taxis.
It seems unlikely that Calgary will get another real boom, though. Now that Alberta's mostly just shipping the northern oil sands off through pipelines there isn't a lot of use in having huge offices there.
Remote work has shifted demands and it’s going to take some work to realign supply with demand. Some of these office towers should be suitable to refit in to apartment buildings. There is never going to be as much demand for office space as there was. The future of cities is being a place to live and the local councils need to fit out cities as comfortable spaces with nice facilities.
The striking part of the linked story is they didn't ask anyone why they don't want to live there, or why they moved away, etc. Just "tax rates always go up and after redevelopment rents will go up even more and I have no idea why nobody is here".
Maybe they have a severe crime problem, or the commute is unbearable, or there's no public transit, or the city council makes bars close at 8pm so young adults can't party. There's plenty of examples from other cities of how to kill a downtown, I'm just curious what Calgary did specifically. Every city in the world has tax problems and redevelopers pushing rents upward. Whats special about Calgary is ... (maybe answer is 'nothing' which is itself the problem?)
Everything shuts down at 5pm and people move back to the suburbs after work. It's fairly dead downtown after rush hour. Finding a coffee shop open at 8 or 9pm? Very few of them.
Art isn't a priority here. Public art installations are ridiculed as a waste of money (though some are accepted over time). Museums and galleries here are minimal.
Music is sterile and many groups skip playing in Alberta. It has gotten better, but Alberta had a reputation for chasing away "immoral" acts in the 90s and 2000s.
Politics are toxic. The current government was elected under a cloud of electoral fraud, does not play well with the opposition and is laser-focused on oil and gas.
Alberta is designed for cars and public transit is a bolt-on, expensive afterthought. This isn't unique to Alberta but it doesn't help. We do have a growing set of bike lanes and support for that has surprised me pleasantly.
Alberta is rich from oil money and if you're in that club, life is good. If not, you're not important to the conversation.
I was lucky to spend a lot of time travelling to the Bay Area, Seattle and other places to see what culture a town could bring beyond "being close to the mountains". I really wish this place would focus on it, but at times it feels like the province is allergic and negatively responds to having any sort of culture.
> Alberta is designed for cars and public transit is a bolt-on, expensive afterthought.
Being downtown even in the afternoon when there are people there is horrible. There is so much traffic and noise that you don't want to even bother exploring or checking things out.
I avoid downtown.
> I really wish this place would focus on it, but at times it feels like the province is allergic and negatively responds to having any sort of culture.
"culture' doesn't fill your campaign coffers and provide 'incentives' to local politicians.
I recently visited downtown there, after spending a year in suburbs due to obvious reasons. Even magpies in downtown are disheveled and downtrodden. I'm not making that up...
If you avoid downtown and like suburbs it's a nice city.
"Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Calgary had the highest rate of commercial vacancies in Canada as an economic downturn driven by the price of oil hollowed out the city’s downtown office towers."
Calgary used to have one of the highest concentrations of head offices in Canada. The tax rates here were minimal.
I had some friends who did presentation and multimedia development for those companies who were suggesting I move here in the early 2000s since they were swamped with work.
Tax rates fell in other provinces and those head offices relocated to take advantage of the new rates as they tend to do.
People want to blame the oil prices and covid but there was a shift in head offices out of Calgary well before either event.
The main driver was that other provinces beat Alberta to the 'race to the bottom' in terms of tax rates.
It is an indicator that development priorities are ass-backwards. We try to attract big corporations thinking they will bring jobs instead of making cities liveable and attracting or building smaller businesses that will actually stay and help keep the city and the province economically feasible.
It's tough to convert office space to housing. Thing about a floor of cubicles: how does that become 10 apartments each with a kitchen, adequate windows, and bathrooms?
Sounds like a great economic opportunity for some construction contracting companies to specialize in these offices-to-apartments conversions. It is possible to gut a lot of the "soft" walls and infrastructure on each floor, bring in more plumbing, and re-build a new floorplan. I'd wager the companies doing these conversions can make a tidy profit (and create employment opportunities!), and still charge the building owners a reasonable-enough rate that they'd rather go this route than sell a dying office building at a huge loss.
You can get a bit creative with this too: e.g. dedicate some floors of the new apartment skyscraper as co-working spaces, and try to plan it so that everyone who rents in the building can use the co-working spaces for "free" as part of their rent and still have some leftover capacity to sell co-working memberships to others nearby as well.
It's not as straight forward as that. One of the major hurdles AFAIK is that many of those office buildings still has asbestos in them in very significant quantities; the buildings were made before the dangers of asbestos were realized.
There was some reasons for leaving it in place, and to be fair a major renovation would have to run into these hurdles either way. But it's probably going to be quite a bit more costly then you're imagining.
I question how many people would actually want to live there if the offices are so empty. In principle, there's no reason you couldn't have a city the residents of which mostly commute out to work and/or work from their homes. But historically jobs have been the main magnet that attracts people to actually live in cities. Yes, especially among younger people, cities are also attractive for other reasons but by and large not enough to cause them to live there lacking other drivers.
One thing the article didn't mention, that at least I think plays a factor, is for whatever reason, no matter how long their properties sit vacant and empty, commercial landlords never seem to lower their lease rates.
For some esoteric reason I don't fully understand that likely is some combination of taxes, capital gains and market pricing, commercial landlords seem to think its more advantageous to let properties sit empty for years, than in it is to lower their rates to see them occupied.
Where I live in Vancouver there are busy commercial neighborhoods that have had literally dozens of storefronts sit empty for years because no one can afford the leases and the landlords won't lower their rates.
It just seems to me, an admittedly unsophisticated commercial real estate neophyte, that the market for commercial real-estate seems to be fundamentally detached from market forces, likely due to the creation of taxation and regulation regime that provides incentives for commercial landlords to hold vacant properties rather than lower rates and if we as a society want to fix this, we need to look frameworks that are in place that make it a better deal for commercial landlords to sit on vacant properties than react to market forces and lower rates.
I was in Calgary at the height of the oil boom in 2008, and even then downtown was a ghost town on winter/fall Sundays.
I left because the number of high-tech companies could be counted quite easily. There were pockets of excellence though.
While there is a toxic attitude present there at the same time people can be very open and honest and friendly too. I love the can-do spirit…when they want to people just go ahead and do it. That was refreshing after a lifetime in Toronto.
I interned at UCalgary during Summer of 2016 as part of an international students exchange program. After the initial euphoria of being in a foreign land, I felt pretty much the same way as many other posters here.
The people are exceedingly polite, the infrastructure is top notch (compared to most American cities I have visited) and feels like it was built assuming 130% capacity or something. The public transit was free downtown. The city govt was clearly doing a bit of work. Yet I felt the downtown area very lacking.
Calgary on the whole had a very uncanny valley feel to it. Apart from the weather I don't have any complaints about the city. The nature and recreation is world class, Indian food is aplenty, the people are incredibly nice and accommodating yet I wouldn't go back. I guess it just wasn't for me.
Honestly, what you say is pretty typical for a lot of North American cities--and elsewhere as well. (Although many/most don't have the nature and recreation options.)
There's nothing wrong with them necessarily. But unless you specifically value living in a city for some walkable access to a few restaurants, markets, etc. there usually are not a lot of unique entertainment and other options that aren't available pretty much everywhere that isn't very rural.
I don't think so. I'm talking about the vibe of a city. Iirc pg wrote an article long back about the vibe of a city.
Vibe is a bit amorphous but I tend to think of vibe as a condensed view of what the city is about, a function of political tendencies, culture (music, sports, tech, entrepreneurship etc) and general friendliness. Job opportunities and decent social life are usually necessary conditions. Major cities like SF and NYC usually have all of them, provided you can afford living there.
But a city like San Antonio cannot offer everything, so if you don't dig Texan/Hispanic culture and don't like basketball, the grand river walk is not going to make you want to live there.
I think we're agreeing. If all you have is a riverwalk or otherwise a nice core but nothing much else that isn't pretty much generic city, that probably isn't much of an attraction to people who don't have some other reason to live there. As a counterpoint if you want something city-lite and don't want the expensive and concentrated NYC experience, maybe a smaller and slower place will be attractive. But, personally, if I can sample most of what a city has to offer in a weekend, I'm probably not interested in making the tradeoffs of city living.
Yes, I found this very surprising. Calgary is as car centric as any average American city and yet they had amazing footpaths and shining public transit. To be fair, their infrastructure is much newer and they don't really have a crime/homeless problem
That's what people have said every time there is a bust. And every time there is a boom, too, with the whole "this time it's different and won't crash"
For the sake of my family living in Alberta, I hope that is the case and this is just a temporary condition, but with the way oil and gas is going and the terrible government running the show in AB right now, I am not very optimistic.
I asked a colleague from the magical land of Canadia whether I should take a flight to London from Edmonton or Calgary after travelling through the Canadian Rockies. She said Edmonton was shit, so Calgary.
As of 2019, Calgary was a kind of US-style car block city, except with nothing to do. Certainly not for tourists. I hope Edmonton isn't really worse, because zzzzz. I was interviewed by the local TV news when I tried to visit a tall building, which was closed.
They do have a lovely park stretching along the river though. I think it'd be a pretty decent place to live if you had a bunch of friends to hang out with. And maybe loads of money too? That helps.
I grew up in Alberta. I am reasonably familiar with both Edmonton and Calgary. Neither is a terribly exciting city, but I would not say "Edmonton is shit." Really, I think they are more or less the same. Edmonton has an even nicer system of parks along the North Saskatchewan River, and isn't terrible for festivals and such in the summer. Calgary's main strength is its proximity to the Rocky mountains. I can't think of much in Calgary proper that I would recommend to tourists, except possibly the stampede. Edmonton has West Edmonton mall if that is your thing. YMMV.
Strong Calgary booster here though I'm originally from BC (~20 years ago). I was one of the economic migrants that caused the population to explode as were many (most?) of the people who moved here in that period. If you were voluntarily willing to pack-up and move across the country for work, demographically you were typically: young, educated and motivated (vs. historically it was desperate and motivated). Calgary still feels "small" for a million-plus people and very meritocratic. It has a neighbourly feel that is very Canadian-prairries, less than an hour to the mountains and not as cold as you might think (outside of February) due to chinooks.
If you're looking for exciting cities I'd stay away from almost ALL Canadian and US locations, but if you're looking for a big cities that supports a lifestyle that's not urba-based, Calgary is pretty great. Everything my family does is either walking distance or a very short drive (I live in the NW beltline) yet I'm very close to all the outdoor-centric activies I love.
IMO it's a lot like Denver. Denver downtown is pretty boring, but there are lots of cool neighborhoods outside of downtown with some character and fun spots. Large, car-oriented, sprawling, flat. Oh, and access to some of the best hiking and skiing in the world.
I worked in Calgary as a software engineer from 2000-2012 at various places, but never in big oil. At the time, a low cost of living, outdoor recreation opportunities, relatively young and healthy population, and good wages for engineers (compared to the rest of Canada) kept me there.
I left for a big-tech job in the bay area, but I still miss elements of the Calgary lifestyle. In particular, the insanely low mortgage payments compared to wages led to a feeling that I could feasibly bootstrap a business without taking a huge financial risk.
I live downtown. You can see my building on that map. I moved to Canada in the infamous March of 2020.
Downtown is sterile. A nice cafe or more likely a nice restaurant will pop up - but there is nothing around it. In Summer, walking a few blocks is fine. In Winter……
There are tech jobs, as the many government funded programs will promote - but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the big cities. And none of the majors, really.
I feel like I’m just biding time here now. When this lease is up, I expect to move to Vancouver, or maybe even Toronto.
Taxes are slightly lower, sure. But you’re paying for that, even if indirectly.
Downtown is sterile. A nice cafe or more likely a nice restaurant will pop up - but there is nothing around it. In Summer, walking a few blocks is fine. In Winter……
In its defense (I have no horse in this fight) lots of downtowns in the US are like that. They’re places to work that empty out at 5pm. Seattle comes to mind. Maybe Chicago and St. Louis? It’s been a long time since I’ve been to those, though...
Calgary is an interesting city at an interesting time. It’s ripe for a new industry, but I’m not sure simply catering to tech is the way to go. There’s high talent, high education, and cheap office space. Housing is also affordable as far as large Canadian cities go. Like many comments in here, I’m tempted to move back there to take advantage of that.
> To bring more people downtown, several office towers have already been turned into apartments, and the federal government has set aside $300-million to convert commercial properties across Canada to rental housing.
While there are obviously genuine environmental concerns, Calgary's decline seems to me a combination of two major forces. First and foremost is economic opposition from the US, who went from the largest consumer of Canadian oil to its largest competitor in the past 10 years. Second, political polarities in Canada that tend to favor concentrating political and economic power along the cities of the St Lawrence instead of Alberta. It would probably be too much to say that the Eastern provinces want Alberta to do poorly, but given the Liberals an d the NDP simply hold no seats in Alberta, there is no incentive to defend its provincial interests (in comparison to say a Quebec company like Bombardier).
However at the moment maybe it's for the better, you don't need to be in the 1% of income earners to buy a house in Calgary.
There are a couple of problems with this reply. The biggest problem is that you missed some important facts - both the NDP and Liberal parties have seats in Alberta. However, you also dipped a toe into populist arguments.
I don’t know your background but Canadians all know about the Liberal/NDP breakthrough in Alberta, so I don’t believe that you’re Canadian. So, next obvious question is why are you talking politics if you don’t even know the most extreme basics??
For example, that silly little thing you said about how Canada tends to favour (you spelled it favor) concentrating political and economic power along the cities of the St. Lawrence is genuinely laughable. Yes, Rebel News says that. But no, it’s really not true.
For one, provinces have an unbelievable amount of control. When provinces blame the federal government, it’s to deflect off their own governments’ profound failures. But second, I’m a Western Canadian, always have been and likely always will be. If you’re going to talk about the west like you know it, at least have enough respect to tell the truth. We had a western Prime Minister. Guess what he did?? He fucked the West with the worst economic recovery plan in the entire G8 after the 2008 economic crash. And in 2011, he introduced Bill C-20, which gave Alberta and BC six more seats each, Ontario FIFTEEN more seats and Québec got two. That’s not only a westerner, but that’s THE WESTERNER that Kenney, Moe et all still go to for walking orders. We can’t suddenly claim western alienation because the price of oil dropped especially when a westerner wrote policy that increased it. Perhaps, they have more seats because they have significantly more people?
I honestly don’t think you’re Canadian. If you are, please allocate at least 120 hours to studying the basics of citizenship.
> And in 2011, he introduced Bill C-20, which gave Alberta and BC six more seats each, Ontario FIFTEEN more seats and Québec got two.
Based on the census. If each citizen's vote is to be counted equally, there's ideally some proportionality to each riding. Of course in reality there's quite a real spread (26K to 132K):
Hahaha - funny coincidence but I used to be really passionate about ProRep, to the point I even annoyed political science majors.
I’ve noticed Canadian democracy has an interesting trait and at this point, I don’t know whether it’s a bug or a feature. Our political parties are in favour of ProRep when they’re in opposition, but the second they’re in power, ProRep is one of those really bad swears they just can’t repeat. This is utterly baffling…
Not really. They can't use their usual playbook in most proportional representation systems. Especially the Liberals. They survive by frightening Ontario progressives into voting for them. If those people knew that they could vote, NDP or Green and have those votes count then the Liberals would ne in a significant amount of trouble.
As would the Conservatives. If social conservatives could move their votes to a social conservative party they mostly would I suspect
I believe he is Canadian, but it also sounds like the US pattern of "We deserve over-representation because look at all this land, or we farm the food, or whatever" is being echoed in Canada.
And THAT is a big problem in Alberta - a lot of the more conservative base has come to identify heavily with a lot of American conservative ideals, up to and including throwing American or Confederate flags on their stuff and parroting the same ideology in the form of bumper stickers. There's even a movement to secede and petition to join the United States. It's very bizarre.
Alberta is heavily under-represented in our federal government, so I don't know what you think it sounds like, but you're dead wrong.
Alberta has 34 seats in parliament with 4.067 million people for an average of 119k people per federal seat. Maritime provinces like Newfoundland have 7 federal seats with a population of 519k, for an average of 74k people per seat. If you look at our Senate, the representation is even more disproportionate. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, with a combined population of 1.8 million people have 24 seats in the Senate, while Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and BC, defined as "The West" and with a population of 11 million receive 24 seats as well.
So no, no one is saying "We deserve over-representation because look at our land", people are saying "we are under-represented in the Senate at a 10-1 ratio, and by almost 2-1 in parliament, and still under-represented even if you remove the maritime provinces from the equation". Your statement is empty stereotyping of the most tired variety.
> New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, with a combined population of 1.8 million people have 24 seats in the Senate, while Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and BC, defined as "The West" and with a population of 11 million receive 24 seats as well.
Isn't it a fixed number of senators per state/provinces? Wyoming has the same number of senate seats as California for instance.
Yes exactly, but isn't that the direct opposite of what the commenter I am replying to was saying? That somehow Alberta is whining about being under-represented and that our landmass should entitle us to seats? I responding to that tired and also completely incorrect idea, not commenting on the merits of a fixed representation in the Senate, we can debate that at a later time.
> Second, political polarities in Canada that tend to favor concentrating political and economic power along the cities of the St Lawrence instead of Alberta.
While the proverbial / meme border between the US and Canada is the 49th parallel, in fact 72% of Canada's population lives below that line. The West (Prairies, BC) and North make up 28% of the population.
50% of the population live in Montreal (N46°) or south of it.
If each citizen's vote is counted equally, is it surprising that most of the Members of Parliament represent most of the population?
To expand upon my parents take, according to Peter Zeihan's opinion piece which shows an interesting glimpse into Alberta and its conflicts with other anti-oil vested interests https://zeihan.com/albertas-tryst-with-destiny/: Alberta oil has constantly been blocked, stalled, and given added friction from leaving Alberta by neighboring territories. Keystone xl pipeline just got axed by Biden and the transmountain pipeline was stalled for years by British Columbia.
Makes me wonder how much of Calgary's downstream economic woes is an attributable result of these upstream anti-oil plays.
It’s convenient to look at Alberta’s woes as a function of upstream anti-oil plays, but there’s significantly more going on here. For example, spend some time reading about Ralph Klein’s austerity budgets in the 1990s. Klein didn’t have to cut nearly as much as he did. Interest rates were incredibly low, Alberta was shielded from the recession and Klein was perfectly placed to know how much investment was starting to flow into the oil sands. Klein had options - serious options that could have changed the economies in Alberta and Saskatchewan forever. Instead, he decimated the public service, killed education, then realized he went too far and tried to double spending over too short of a time. The damage was done and Alberta lost its best and brightest policy people.
British Columbia was completely fucked at the time and their premier had a good working relationship with Klein. That was the time for pipelines, not the time for austerity.
Ed Stellmach had little hope after Klein. Klein’s drunk driving was a massive scandal and that didn’t help, but by the time Klein was gone, Alberta’s public service was in the toilet. Provinces have a lot of power under Canada’s constitution but they need a strong public service to capitalize upon that.
There's also the entire equalization debate which Alberta is so fond of throwing in the rest of Canada's face.
For those non-Canadians, Canada has an "equalization" program which is essentially an attempt to "smooth out" tax income across the country, so the "have" provinces fund the "have not" provinces so Canadians across the country can have a similar standard of living and similar services.
Alberta, being the richest province, ends up paying way more equalization to the poorest provinces, mostly Quebec and the Maritimes. This is one of the significant factors of "western alienation", in that Albertans are continuously furious that their funds go to pay for Quebec's generous social systems. In fact, the Alberta government is holding a referendum next week on this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Alberta_referendum).
Of course, bringing reality into the situation makes things look a little different, which is something that doesn't happen in the Canadian national discourse. Equalization is complicated, but there is no cheque written from Alberta to Quebec. Instead, the federal government pays Quebec its share of it from its own funds, mostly from federal income and sales taxes. The calculation of it is based on potential tax revenue. Alberta, being a province full of high income earners, has a very high potential tax revenue, so it is a "have" province and doesn't receive equalization. The idea is that provinces that can't raise their own revenue comparable to the other provinces get a break.
The issue is that Alberta has been chronically under taxing for years. It has no sales tax, it has the lowest by far income tax rates of the entire country. The system is designed for provinces to be responsible and raise their own revenue, and then get federal subsidies if that is not enough, but Alberta refuses to play that game. The Alberta government has been able to direct this rage to the federal government and Quebec though when the people really should be looking to their own provincial government instead.
This was really contentious following the oil busy in the mid 2010s. Alberta as a province was hurting, as a significant portion of its revenue came from oil royalties. However, since it refuses to raise taxes, it did not receive equalization payments despite being by all measures except the official ones a "have not" province.
A lot of Albertans are angry about pipelines and not being able to properly export their oil, as other posters have mentioned. Developing more infrastructure probably would be a good thing, especially when oil was cheap. Unfortunately, Canadian political discourse is not serious and its not possible to talk about serious, complex issues nationally.
> Equalization is complicated, but there is no cheque written from Alberta to Quebec. Instead, the federal government pays Quebec its share of it from its own funds, mostly from federal income and sales taxes. The calculation of it is based on potential tax revenue.
Tell me if I'm wrong but someone from Quebec told me that equalization always has to be profitable for Quebec. Else, nationalists will bring up that they are footing the bill for the whole country and want out.
> The Alberta government has been able to direct this rage to the federal government and Quebec though when the people really should be looking to their own provincial government instead.
The same guy told me you could win elections really easily by bashing Quebec (which sounds absurd, here you'll get no reaction bashing NY for gubernatorial race) and that Newfoundland apparently almost went bankrupt twice with such governments (they were doing hydro I think?).
Hey pal, honestly, I loved reading this reply. If you’re ever in the market for a Canadian friend who likes political discourse, my email is in my profile. Otherwise, if you happen to blog, let me know - it’s remarkably rare to find such clearheaded political discourse in Canada. This is an incredibly cool moment and seriously, thank you.
Your last sentence is one of my favourite things I’ve read about Canadians. It reminds me a little of something Pierre Berton would have written. I love Canada, dig Canadiana and find our people’s history absolutely fascinating. But as a culture, we’ve never been capable of having a complex debate as a nation without going back to the same debates we had pre-Confederation. As far as we’ve come, it wouldn’t be wrong to talk about the Northwest versus Upper Canada. That’s bloody weird…
Interesting. Another natural resource based region fails to be much more than a temporary natural resource based economy. It appears that making lasting change from this sort of thing takes more than just effort. It takes some sort of directed policy making.
Even discounting what others said about significant opposition to further investment in fossil fuels: Alberta oil is in tar sands, which is expensive to refine and is not economically viable to extract unless the price of oil is over $70-80/barrel, which is historically not steady enough to justify massive capital investment in refining capacity.
Basically, when the price of oil is over $75/barrel, tar sands extraction spins up, pulling in high priced labour from all over; when it drops below that, there's a lot of layoffs and work stoppage. This is why Alberta is caught in a perpetual boom/bust cycle. And politically, it's really hard to diversify to stabilize and break this cycle, when everyone is screaming for supporting the oil industry. Unqualified support for tar sands exploitation is a litmus test for any Alberta politician.
We have a bunch, the one in Saint John is one of the bigger refineries in the world (325000 barrels per day), not top 10 or anything. Of course it's all refined crude from Saudi.
> there is no incentive to defend its provincial interests (in comparison to say a Quebec company like Bombardier).
It's interesting you are bringing up the aerospace sector (so mostly Bombardier) because of the CSeries saga.
Trudeau immediately bowed down to Trump when tariffs were imposed on these planes, despite later being thrown out in courts. All he did was to basically threaten to not buy Boeing fighter jets and instead get f35 from Lockheed (which he was contractually obligated to anyways).
No support for the industry, nothing. And that was for a flagship prestige technological project.
I still don't understand why he reacted so submissively to Trump. Having the CSeries sold to Airbus at a huge discount was foolish: The plane already had a profitable amount of orders. Now Europeans are reaping the benefits.
This needs to be addressed, there are a lot of skyscrapers that are abandoned, and it seems that it looks like a ghost town inside of a concrete jungle.
I lived and worked in Edmonton and Calgary for about 8 years before moving to London (UK) and I can confidently say that I have no intention of ever going back.
To me, those two cities are exemplars for the concept of 'soul-less glass and steel altars to capitalism'. They're now even more desolate as millennials such as myself left for better opportunities. I also agree with other commenters that the politics there are toxic, and very much stuck in the past. I wish the best for everybody remaining there, hopefully they can transition to a more sustainable economic model and excise the regressive, entitled political culture that's sprung forth from decades of unbridled decadence.
Oil and gas dying is part of the problem, but ask many new grads from local universities why they are leaving and the answer is mainly that this is just not the place for them. That's a terrible sign for the future.
The comment by julianlam elsewhere in this thread reminded me of a time I toured a local startup's office who had "reclaimed" an executive level of a previous oil and gas company. The entire floor was decorated like a Roman Emperor's quarters and the boardroom table itself was worth somewhere north of $200k (possibly as much as half a millon).