Yeah, it's perfect. I never expected to be able to say I could live in Markham, happily.
But
that neighbourhood, sure.
I'd eventually need to have a mix of classes - middle-aged women with underwear on their head as a hairnet leaning out the second-floor window smoking, pretty and stylish teenage girls with morbidly obese fathers, trendy couples, guitar-playing douchebags on the front steps... all of things I love about the rowhouse neighbourhoods here.
But the actual built form, that Markham one is perfectly fine. There's nothing I
need to change to be satisfied with it. It's even treeless for that old British urban feel.
I don't like it as much as my favourite block in Ontario - downtown Paris - or Kensington Market - but it's probably in third place.
Paris Ontario by
Rick Blythe, on Flickr
Working Class Homes In Toronto by
Greg's Southern Ontario (catching Up Slowly), on Flickr
I mean, come on... the Paris one is an even more beautiful version of here, and the Kensington one... I at least know it matches St. John's in that richness of artsy, dirty urban life, and I assume it even exceeds it. I could do either of those as well, the latter probably for life without dying of homesickness. I really think if I lived in that blue house my life would be, in terms of the things about it I'm most attached to, the things I miss immediately or over the course of weeks, months, when I'm anywhere else, more or less the same as it is now.