When Jess and Adam Lee brought their newborn daughter, Olivia — six pounds, seven ounces — home this month from the new Milton District Hospital, they were thrilled with the calibre of care they received in their adopted community.Jess was relieved to find she liked the obstetrician who worked out of the hospital, where 89 babies were born in December and another 79 delivered in January. The number of births has been steadily increasing over the past decade as Milton’s population has grown, according to Halton Healthcare.That growth is being fuelled by families like the Lees, part of a young, house-hungry demographic driven to the outskirts of the Toronto region by the relative affordability of real estate.The Lees bought a three-bedroom, semi-detached house last spring, just before the Toronto area’s property fever broke. They paid about $700,000 for the kind of home with a yard they could not afford near their old condo in Etobicoke.Read more: Scooch over: Toronto has room for more density, study saysThe challenge of urban density: They can see the school from their balconies but their kids can’t attendHow the Star’s Growing Pains series aims to offer solutions amid growing urban densityWhen they looked at houses in their old neighbourhood, they were “basically our max budget and needed a lot of work,” said Adam. He figures it would have taken at least $1 million to raise those fixer-uppers to the standard of what they bought in Milton. “We would walk around our neighbourhood and see the houses there and there was just no hope, even on two salaries, of affording them,” said Adam, who teaches high school in Mississauga. Jess is an occasional teacher in the Halton board.Neither had ties to Milton. But the greenery and parks reminded Adam of his parents’ place in Scarborough, where, as a boy, he loved romping around a big yard with a pool. Couples like the Lees have helped make Milton a Canadian bo ...
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