Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Vancouver housing least affordable to its own citizens, survey says

6th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey

Susan Lazaruk, The ProvinceJanuary 25, 2010

It now takes more than nine years of income to purchase a Vancouver home, triple what it had taken families for generations to own their home. That puts Vancouver at the top of the list of “severely unaffordable” houses ranked in 272 cities in the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, New Zealand and Australia. A new study that calculated the cities’ “median multiple” -- the median residential house sale value divided by the median annual gross household income -- put Vancouver at 9.3. Other B.C. cities in the “severely unaffordable category,” which is anything above 5.1 years: Victoria (7.9), Abbotsford (6.6) and Kelowna (5.9), according to the study by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg. Outside of B.C., the next highest median multiple is in Toronto, at 5.2, which falls into the “severely unaffordable” category for the first time, followed by Montreal, at 4.9. The median for all 28 cities ranked in Canada was 3.7, up from 3.5 last year, according to the sixth annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey released Monday.

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