I'm sorry, but some of your claims sound absurd. I know that Toronto is liable to be quite different from Huston, but I'm renting a 3 bedroom suite on the second floor of a house for $1300. As an added bonus, we get all of the cherries that we can eat in mid-summer as well as the privilege to plant our own garden. This is on the boundary of downtown core of a major metropolitan centre. We are within walking distance to two street car routes, one subway line, and one bus route. More importantly, we are close to the ammenities, including groceries, first rate schools (K-PhD), libraries, and well over a dozen computer stores. If you are getting cramped quarters, bad schools, and are stuck with a low paying job when the cost of living is high -- then I suggest looking for a better city to live in.
I live in a good end of town, but I both work and volunteer in the bad ends of town. While you do see some shit happening, there are also a lot of really good people in those communities. As a friend of mine put it, she probably wouldn't want to raise kids there -- but she knows how to make the right decisions, so it doesn't make much of a difference to her. While crime may be worse in some of those neighbourhoods, it's not likely to happen to you unless you make the wrong decisions. Most of the paranoia that people feel surrounding these places is simply due to sensationalism to boost the ratings of news programmes or surreal crime dramas.

I'm sorry Mike, but when I read comments like those, I tend to see them as a list of excuses. Excuses that aren't much different from a child refusing to sleep with the lights turned off because of some fictitious monster under the bed, mostly because they are too scared to look under the bed to judge for themselves.

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