Calgary

[updated september 2024]

SO, roomiematch.com's Calgary roommate rundown:

Calgary has long cold winters with severe nighttime temperature drops . . . but it's still dry and sunny!

If you can handle a long winter punctuated with hail at a high elevation, you'll be rewarded with a Stampede! The Calgary Stampede. It's in July. You and your roommates are not required to don cowboy gear and sidle up to stacks of pancakes. But you should.

If you're into any outdoor sport played upon an exceedingly crisp snowscape, you'll love Calgary, which many winter adventurers already know!

However, if you and your roommates prefer staying in to bundling up, you'll have to get creative to keep yourselves entertained, for sure.

But all roommates, wintersporting and non, will be rewarded with a clean safe friendly city with cleaner air and lower taxes! Cleaner and lower than most cities Calgary's size!

Also there are many trains with well-behaved dogs riding around on them right now.

The rest of the Calgary roommate lowdown:

• Calgary is a clean safe city with clean air and a low sales tax in southern Alberta along Highway 1 at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.
• In terms of elevation, Calgary is the highest metro area in Canada, so it features long cold winters, heavy rain in summer, and nighttime temperature drops that are severe . . . but it's often a very dry and sunny freezing cold!
• Calgary lies within Alberta's "Hailstorm Alley" which tends to see severely damaging hailstorms every few years.
• home to Mount Royal University, SAIT Polytechnic, Bow Valley College, Alberta University of the Arts, Ambrose University College, St. Mary's University College, and the University of Calgary
• The CTrain transit system features 9 train stations in downtown Calgary. It's free to ride downtown. Including the suburban stops, the CTrain carries over 250,000 riders every weekday. About half of Calgary's downtown workers ride the CTrain to work.
• If you'd like a dog as a roommate as well, Calgary is extremely friendly. The Ctrain features connections to over 150 offleash spaces for dogs. Many restaurants are dog-friendly too.
• There's no provincial sales tax. If you move to Calgary, there still the 5% federal Goods and Services Tax, but nothing local. The cost of living for almost everything is lower than other Canadian cities, including smaller ones.
• Calgary has more walking and cycling path than anywhere else in North America, with over 600 miles. Most of Calgary rides a bicycle, no matter how cold it gets. With all those paths connected with urban bridges and pedestrian skyways, most roommates will want to try cycling Calgary too.

After you're settled down, you and your roommates should experience Calgary's:

• Calgary Stampede: Annual rodeo and fair held every July. Over a million folks show up over just ten days, while locals put on their western wear and serve pancakes. Party!
• Columbia Icefield Skywalk: If you and your roommates are into the rest of Calgary's pedestrian skyways, you won't want to miss this one. It's their extra special skyway built into the bedrock off a cliff face! Fortunately it also features a thick glass bottom.

Here's the city of Calgary's properties and neighborhoods page, featuring community profiles, garbage recycling and compost pickup, and other resources for both property owners and renters.

Notes

1.   The non-traditional roommate rent average for this city we've experienced over the last 3 years. We can't predict future rental availability, because we're neither in control of any rental market nor psychic, sorry!

But in most cities most of the time, the recent and relatively recent past are the best predictors.


2.   This idea came from smartasset.com's ranking of what a roommate saves you in 50 cities. They ranked where roommates will save you the most money, based on the average cost of a 1BR as opposed to a 2BR ÷ 2. Unsurprisingly, the more expensive the city, the more you can save, but the savings are significant in all larger metros. So we got the data for the rest of our cities from Zumper too.

This is really the minimum you could save, as you could live with more than one roommate, split more services, share food or other supplies, etc. More sharing tends to lead to more savings too, as per our roommate roadmap.

As per the rest of the description at the top of this page, we're calling this "traditional" roommate rent.


3.   From zumper.com.


5.   Directly quoted from Walk Score's Cities and Neighborhoods Ranking. They've ranked "more than 2,800 cities and over 10,000 neighborhoods so you can find a walkable home or apartment."

While each city's rundown already includes their individual Walk Score, dedicated pedestrians might like to see all roommate cities ranked for walkability.


6.   From various lists here on our own best roommate cities.


7.   From hoodmaps.com: a collaborative map where residents use tags describing social situations you're likely to find. Other users can thumb up or down, so the largest tags have been thumbed up the most.