Mississauga is traditionally thought of as a suburb or bedroom community of Toronto, but in fact Mississauga is the sixth most populous city in all of Canada. A Mississauga home for sale is snapped up fast because it is a growing city. It has been eating up the smaller surrounding towns and villages nearly as fast as Toronto has been eating up surrounding cities. Its population now stands at 668,000, a number which is nearly doubling with each passing decade.
Mississauga is a popular destination for new immigrants, commuters from Toronto, real estate developers, and people who want to open small or medium sized businesses which would be prohibitively expensive to operate in downtown Toronto, more so even than Whitby real estate. Mississauga's greater availability of land also makes it attractive to large corporations wishing to set up Canadian headquarters in the Greater Toronto Area. It is currently home to dozens of corporate offices and Fortune 500 companies including Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Pepsi, General Electric, and Wal-Mart and the number is always increasing.
The availability and relative cheapness of large parcels of land in Mississauga has also been attractive to retail chains. Mississauga is home to a number of big-box style malls and outlet centers, including the Square One Mall, which is one of the largest shopping centers in Canada. It even has a store that sells bamboo diapers.
Mississauga has a looser, more eclectic mix of residents than smaller Toronto suburbs. Because everyone is relocating to Toronto during the day, the community is not as tight-knit, especially as most of its residents split their time between Mississauga and Toronto. Mississauga has suffered somewhat from this in terms of its identity as a community but recent efforts have been made by the city to distance itself culturally from Toronto including holding an architectural design competition for a landmark condominium tower.
Demographically Mississauga hovers between the typical makeup of a suburb (primarily white and Christian) and the cultural melting pot of a big city (which has been seeing a large influx of Asian immigrants). 40% of the residents of Mississauga identify themselves as belonging to a visible minority, and 45% are able to speak a language that is not English. Everyone does their home designs in metric, however.
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