How do you know when Toronto is too expensive to be hip? When the artists move to Hamilton. Our high-priced real estate is fuelling a growing exodus down the QEW. And it’s an entirely different migration from moving to the burbs. Hamilton—with its downtown-centred 19th-century layout, industrial heritage and fiery smokestacks—is as urban as it gets. Though it’s uneasily close to Toronto, it is not a satellite; it has an orbit of its own.

Writer Sky Gilbert and his partner, artist and curator Ian Jarvis, moved in 2003. “We couldn’t afford a house in Toronto,” he says, “and we wanted a charming old Victorian in a downtown core.” He found his house, just off the now burgeoning gallery strip of James Street North, for $90,000. “Hamilton does not smell,” he says. “It’s a beautiful ex–steel town. It’s very much like Baltimore or Queens—the little diamond in the rough beside the money- coloured ice palaces of the big city.”

Andrew McPhail, a 47-year-old Toronto artist and a long-time anchor of the Toronto gallery scene, moved in 2005. “We sold our house in Riverdale and bought a three-bedroom 1894 home here for $150,000, slightly less than a third of our Toronto house’s selling price.” As a result of the windfall, both he and his boyfriend, a former social worker, have retired.

At least one big developer is betting on the Richard Florida revitalization-through-the-creative-classes effect. Harry Stinson, the original force behind the Candy Factory, which kick-started Toronto’s loft conversion boom, was all but run out of town after his One King West project fell apart. He’s in negotiations to buy Hamilton’s Royal Connaught Hotel (which has been vacant for the past four years) and turn it into a condo–shopping complex.

Jim Chambers, founder of what became Gallery TPW and one of the forces behind the birth of West Queen West as a gallery district, has bought and sold three homes since moving six years ago. “I feel like a kid in a candy store,” he says. His latest purchase was a five-bedroom, three-storey detached Georgian Revival home built in 1890, which he picked up in July 2007 for $139,000. He also bought his own gallery on James Street North for less than $100,000. “Quite aside from the price difference,” Chambers says, “when neighbourhoods like Queen West get too expensive, they lose the qualities that made artists want to live there in the first place.”

For Hamilton, rampant gentrification is a way off. The city is still resolutely working class, and the James Street strip full of vacant storefronts, dollar stores and bars caters to what Chambers refers to as Hamil­ton’s broken people. Since the commute’s a bitch—and will remain so at least until the city gets its own Via stop, plus expanded GO train service in 2010—for the moment, Hamilton is for people who want to be Hamiltonians, and a bargain hunter’s paradise.