Two Canadian Cities Make Global List of Most Expensive Places to Buy a Home

Two Canadian cities have been deemed “impossibly unaffordable” after ranking among the top 12 most expensive housing markets in the English-speaking world. A new report from Demographia named Vancouver as the third least-affordable city in the world while Toronto took 11th place on the list. The report examined middle-income affordability across 94 major housing markets in Canada, Australia, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Each city’s house-price-to-income ratio was then ranked based on a score determined by dividing the median house price in a city by its gross average household income. A score of less than 3 is considered “affordable,” while a score between 3.1 and 4.0 is “moderately unaffordable.” A score between 4.1 and 5.0 is listed as “seriously unaffordable,” and markets scoring between 5.1 and 8.9 are considered “severely unaffordable.”...