The west end

4 neighbourhoods running from the edge of downtown to the county line. Hintonburg and Wellington West turned from a working-class west end into the city's restaurant district inside twenty years, with Preston Street and Little Italy on the canal side of it. Westboro did the same thing a decade earlier and is now mid-rise. Then the Greenbelt, and beyond it Kanata — a planned town of 76,000 absorbed in the 2001 amalgamation, holding the densest technology cluster in Canada — and Stittsville, a village on the Carp Road that has become one of the fastest-growing places in Ontario.

The dividing line is the Greenbelt, and the practical question it poses is the commute. Inside it, Westboro and Hintonburg are a bus ride or a bike path from Parliament Hill, and both will be on Line 1 when the west extension opens — currently expected in 2027, which is a date that has moved before. Outside it, Kanata and Stittsville are Highway 417 or nothing: there is no rail in the plan for either, and the Queensway between Eagleson and Moodie is the most reliably congested stretch of road in the region. What you buy with that drive is space, newness and the province's best-rated school catchments.