Charleswood

Charleswood sits across John Laurie Boulevard from Nose Hill Park — eleven square kilometres of grassland and coulees, with the whole city laid out below you from the top of it. Senator Patrick Burns School on Chilcotin Road and Banff Trail School on Cochrane Road are both inside the community, and so is the Triwood Community Association hall on Chicoutimi Drive, with the arena, the outdoor rinks and the sports fields behind it. Every street here starts with the same two letters — Chilcotin, Chicoutimi, Cheyenne, Cherokee, Charleswood Drive — which is fine until you are giving somebody directions over the phone.

86% of the homes here are detached, around 1,240 of them. 93% went up before 1981 and a quarter before 1961. There are no apartment buildings and no row houses to speak of, which is why the Calgary Real Estate Board publishes no condominium figures for Charleswood at all.

So what Charleswood gives you is houses on full lots, an arena at the end of the street and a park the size of a small town across the road. What it does not give you is anywhere smaller to move to. 87% of residents were at the same address a year ago and 64% were at the same address five years ago. Couples whose children have moved out now outnumber couples with children at home, 405 to 385 — a lot of bedrooms nobody sleeps in, in a community that never got around to building anything smaller.

Which makes the useful question a different one. If you are in one of those houses and it has become more house than you want to look after, the thing to work out first isn’t the price — it is where you would go instead and what it costs to be there, because the answer usually isn’t on this side of John Laurie. And if you are buying in, most of what matters won’t show on a walkthrough: what has been done to the house since it was built, who did it, and whether there is a permit on file. Where the newest homes are forty-five years old, that history is most of the difference between two houses that look the same from the sidewalk.