from an article in "Business In Vancouver" :
Vancouver housing still “unaffordable”
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
It’s not the least affordable housing market in the English-speaking world, but Vancouver is no Atlanta.
According to a new housing survey released Tuesday, Vancouver is a “severely unaffordable market”, ranking 80th out of 82 major metropolitan areas.
The survey, published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, compared housing affordability across 325 housing markets in seven English speaking countries, including 82 metropolitan markets with populations in excess of one million.
In addition to Canada, other countries included Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the U.K., the U.S. and Hong Kong.
The survey used a “median multiple” to measure affordability, which divided median house prices by gross annual household income.
Atlanta was rated the most affordable housing market, according to the survey, with a median house price of $129,400 and median multiple of 2.3.
That’s compared to Vancouver, which had a median price of $602,000 and a median multiple of 9.5.
David Seymour, a senior policy analyst with the Frontier Centre, told Business in Vancouver that the city’s high real estate prices are the result of municipal efforts to curb growth.
“For the last 20 years Vancouver as a municipality, or the various municipalities that make up the Vancouver housing market, have tried their damndest to basically prevent the city from growing any further,” Seymour said. “… It’s been very difficult and costly to build new houses in the [Greater Vancouver Regional District].
“One of the axiom’s of economics is if you reduce or constrain supply the price will go up, and that’s basically what’s happened in Vancouver.”
http://www.bivinteractive.com/index....3682&Itemid=46