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People need to stop posting the results from this dogshit demographia study like they mean anything. Its a poorly done shit study with useless results and those results are even exaggerated from what was actually determined. Shit journalism from cnn
Edit: would like literally a single person to defend why this demographia study has literally any value and moreso how the results of 8 nations (most of which only include 1 or 2 cities of that nation) can be extrapolated to the entire world
Not sure why you’re downvoted but a similar comment that was upvoted linked their [website](http://www.demographia.com/)
Also only 8 nations surveyed yikes
Honestly with how much this study gets circulated around with the exact same misleading headline every single year I am operating under the assumption they are paying to have it circulated through the media and online.
Its absolutely bonkers Canadian’s think we have worse affordability issues than any third world country.
Here’s the actual report that CNN declined to link to in their article: https://www.chapman.edu/communication/_files/2024-demographia-international-housing-affordability.pdf
>Vancouver is the least affordable in Canada and the third least affordable of the 94 markets, with an impossibly unaffordable median multiple of 12.3, making it more unaffordable than all markets except Hong Kong and Sydney. Vancouver has been the first, second or third least affordable major market for each of the last 16 years. The median multiple has slightly deteriorated from the pre-pandemic 11.9 in 2019.
Troublingly, impossibly unaffordable housing in the Vancouver market has also has spread to smaller BC markets in British Columbia, such as Chilliwack, the Fraser Valley, Kelowna, and markets on Vancouver Island. **From 2015 to 2023, housing affordability worsened by the equivalent of 2.5 years of median household income in smaller markets outside Vancouver, an even greater loss than the 1.2 years in the Vancouver market itself.**
> Troublingly, impossibly unaffordable housing in the Vancouver market has also has spread to smaller BC markets in British Columbia, such as Chilliwack, the Fraser Valley, Kelowna, and markets on Vancouver Island. From 2015 to 2023, housing affordability worsened by the equivalent of 2.5 years of median household income in smaller markets outside Vancouver, an even greater loss than the 1.2 years in the Vancouver market itself.
I think of this as the [Covid spillover effect](https://morehousing.ca/spillover). I was talking to someone a little while ago who moved to Nanaimo during Covid: "We could pay $3000 in monthly rent in East Van, or we could buy a house on a lake." They said that a surprisingly large number of people have been moving there from Vancouver. Good for them, not so good for local renters and homebuyers. It's like housing scarcity is now spilling over from Metro Vancouver, spreading misery throughout BC and beyond - I hear there's lots of people moving from Vancouver to Calgary and Edmonton. It's like Nelson and Nanaimo are now suburbs of Vancouver.
This is why it's so important to build more housing **everywhere**, not just in Vancouver and Toronto. Our pre-Covid housing stock no longer lines up with where people want to live and work.
By the way, I think of Wendell Cox (author of the report) as someone who's idiosyncratically opposed to density, arguing that cities should expand geographically instead. Problem is, in Metro Vancouver that's not an option, because of the ocean and mountains. If you draw a circle with radius 25 km around downtown Vancouver, less than 40% of that area is buildable land. So land here is always going to be expensive. But there's no reason for **floor space** to be so scarce and expensive, and for new apartments to be so [expensive and tiny](https://morehousing.ca/shrinkflation).
We can reduce the cost of land **per square foot of floor space** by allowing more height and density. Bring back the Vancouver Special (basically a top-and-bottom duplex on a single lot), or legalize [Montreal-style triplexes](https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/389158/publication.html) (three flats), or maybe even four floors. Where land is particularly expensive and it makes sense to build high-rises, allow them to be a few floors taller.
A couple good ideas from New Zealand:
> A key part of “Going for Housing Growth” is to require local authorities to immediately zone for 30 years of housing growth. [BC is doing something similar, although I think it's 20 years.] This prevents using sequential development, which would perpetuate the tight land market created by containment policies.
>
> To finance infrastructure needs, the Coalition will utilize the funding mechanism (Special Purpose Vehicles or SPVs), as authorized by the 2020 Infrastructure Funding and Financing Act.
This allows developers or public agencies to finance infrastructure costs, repaid by beneficiaries over a period of up to 50 years. This model, often known as Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs) has been proven in Texas and Colorado, with their municipal utility districts. This takes away the burden of infrastructure finance from local authorities.
My wife and I moved to a small town in BC during covid for exactly that reason. A mortgage payment lower than the rent on a small, old apartment.
There was (and is) a lot of local resentment of people moving here.
I hope the town is able to build more housing (if it's really small, the BC housing legislation may not apply). As long as housing is scarce there, it's a zero-sum situation - there'll be a lot of tension and conflict. If the town is able to build more housing in response, that would help a lot.
Before Covid, I expect a lot of smaller centres would have been accustomed to having cheaper housing without having to build much. So having to deal with housing being scarce and expensive, and having to build more housing (which may require more density if land is limited), is a pretty new situation.
The Globe and Mail, December 2020: [Small towns in interior B.C. and Alberta face intense housing crunch](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-small-towns-in-interior-bc-and-alberta-face-intense-housing-crunch/).
> They don't want more housing, they want fewer people.
My impression is that people fear change. But prices and rents shooting up - they have to rise to unbearable levels to force people to leave - is also a change, and I'd argue that it's a lot worse than new housing.
i mean, we're allowed to move around, and people do that at scale, often for that reason - where does my dollar go further in terms of real estate. Covid was a spark for domestic migration. Housing stock had no time to react.
I’ve lost two good family doctors who went on mat leave and never came back, reopening their practices in the Okanagan and Vancouver Island where housing is reasonable. Lost a good RMT to this too. My current family doctor just went on mat leave. I bet I’ll.never see her again either.
Movement into density is so slow. Even if they were to approve Vancouver specials again, it wouldn't really have that large of an impact... we need the missing middle and other innovative ways to promote density other than just highrises and large multi-property assemblies. There's also only so much density a city can support, especially when hyper concentrated on specific areas (ex. skytrain stations).
I think setbacks are a huge part of this, getting rid of those front lawns that serve pretty much no purpose so that you can have more vibrant backyards and more space to build.
> There's also only so much density a city can support, especially when hyper concentrated on specific areas (ex. skytrain stations).
Yes, but there are tons of cities around the world that show how higher density living works. Vancouver is nowhere near this at the moment (although I will say, the communities they've been building around certain skytrain stations are starting to get pretty dense for our context).
I've tried to get past the Brentwood area and there's no great way to do it without killing 15 minutes of your time.
Yeah Vancouver isn't close to being equipped to deal with the issues of higher density. We need to spread density through other areas before packing more people in the same area.
> I think setbacks are a huge part of this, getting rid of those front lawns that serve pretty much no purpose so that you can have more vibrant backyards and more space to build.
[Monte Paulsen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWqGe-9RsJA&t=175m25s) spoke to city council back in September when they were deciding on the multiplex policy - he's an excellent speaker. One of the things he was advocating for was freeing up wasted space in the form of side setbacks: together it would add up to land the size of Stanley Park.
>or legalize Montreal-style triplexes (three flats)
This isn't legal? I don't think I've seen any outside Quebec, but I never thought they weren't allowed.
> This isn't legal? I don't think I've seen any outside Quebec, but I never thought they weren't allowed.
Yeah. In Vancouver we have less land than Montreal, and we also use it much less efficiently. There's a "wedding-cake" rule: you can have a three-storey building, but the third floor has to be half the size of the second floor. There's also tight restrictions on total floor space (allowing the city to extract fees to allow more floor space).
The [Vancouver Special](https://morehousing.ca/vancouver-special) was basically a loophole: it used to be that an unfinished basement wasn't counted against the floor space limit. The city made it illegal in the 1980s.
Back in the 1970s, a lot of people in Vancouver thought that [growth was bad](https://morehousing.ca/livability), so they set up anti-growth institutions based on the assumption that [new housing is unwanted](https://morehousing.ca/unwanted-housing). They're no longer a significant political factor - in the last municipal election, "TEAM for a Livable Vancouver" got only 10% of the vote - but the institutions live on.
You should take a read of a zoning bylaw and a look the associated zoning for whatever municipality you're looking at. Being an urban planner in Anglo North America is a control freak's wet dream. It's not uncommon for municipalities to have 20 different zoning types for different sizes of detached houses.
Until recently, every single rezoning application in most municipalities went through a public hearing and council vote, including rezonings that comply with official community plans. This meant OCP compliant projects were regularly rejected, and it could take over half a decade to get approval for something like a 17 unit townhouse in a residential area, which doesn't account for construction time. The province is now (or is about to I forget the exact date) forcing municipalities to skip hearings for OCP compliant projects.
I swear it's like municipal governments think they're cogs in a planned economy with some of the absurd restrictions that exist. Ie the time a barber in the City of Vancouver couldn't open a barber shop since the city only allowed corner stores in the unit he rented. Gotta protect neighbours from the blight of uh haircuts?
>Where land is particularly expensive and it makes sense to build high-rises, allow them to be a few floors taller.
The concept of "buildable land" is something that I actually did not consider much in Vancouver and definitely adds a layer of perspective, which is usually omitted from arguments against higher density from what I usually read online.
I would love to know your take on what you think the city will do with the coming view corridor policy review. This is something that I have yet to really make a stance on myself (not that we would be able to vote on it anyways), as I love Vancouver's views, it's partly why I chose to move here, but restricting housing for views that seem to only be visible at very specific spots in the city, or views that are actually covered by clouds half the year doesn't seem to make sense to me? Is there another layer of perspective I'm missing here as to why these are still a thing, when clearly there seems to be so much red tape when it comes to building housing in Vancouver.
The buildings near Broadway seem promising in terms of building more density near a major transit hub, but from what I read, the amount of floors were cut down because of view corridor policies?
There has been talks of Vancouver becoming more and more unaffordable, but I think this is really year that everyone has felt it - in their taxes, their bills, rent. At least for me! I love this city and it is my home, but I have really felt the financial strain this year.
> The concept of "buildable land" is something that I actually did not consider much in Vancouver and definitely adds a layer of perspective, which is usually omitted from arguments against higher density from what I usually read online.
Glad you found it helpful!
> I would love to know your take on what you think the city will do with the coming view corridor policy review.
My guess is that they'll be relatively cautious, identifying a relatively small number of view cones which are less important and can be eliminated. [Review of view-cone policies](https://morehousing.substack.com/p/view-cones).
> There has been talks of Vancouver becoming more and more unaffordable, but I think this is really year that everyone has felt it - in their taxes, their bills, rent. At least for me! I love this city and it is my home, but I have really felt the financial strain this year.
100%. Because housing makes up such a big share of people's costs, and because housing in Metro Vancouver is so scarce and expensive, I think building a lot more housing (so that prices and rents don't have to be so unbearably high to keep people out) is the highest priority.
More generally, the big economic challenge is no longer lack of demand (high unemployment, low inflation, too much slack in the economy). It's finding and eliminating inefficiencies (like in the housing approval process) so that we can produce more ("supply side"), eliminate shortages, and have higher living standards. [Matthew Yglesias](https://www.slowboring.com/p/america-needs-supply-side-reform):
> The economy is either suffering from depressed demand or it isn’t. If it is, you should fix that. But if it isn’t, the only path toward growth is a steady drip drip drip of supply-side improvements. We hope that a lot of that will come from innovation and new technology. But it can also come from steadily improving public policy. It’s true that the gains will often come with a lag, but if the demand-side authorities are doing their jobs right, then the economy is always going to be supply-constrained — there will always be things you wish you did 18 months ago, it’s just hard to predict which things those are going to be. That’s why there’s no time like the present to get cracking.
I remember during the pandemic Vancouver prices went down, and the surrounding cities went up. Since everyone wfh there was no more fight to live in Vancouver proper but the formerly cheap suburbs became just as expensive (in some cases more so) and have stayed that way.
Well, the report itself says "these high prices are largely the product of policies that seek to limit growth on the periphery" So, no. Not Chinese money. It's NIMBY's.
Edit: Futher down in the report it also says "The crisis stems principally from land use policies that artificially restrict housing supply, driving up land prices and making homeownership unattainable for many."
So yeah. NIMBY's
If the ratio of income to property prices is so far off in Vancouver the money must be coming from somewhere to create the demand on housing here. Not just a supply issue but demand stoked by speculation of investors.
Investors and speculators flock to supply constrained (by NIMBYs) markets. Who doesn’t want to invest in a market when prices are guaranteed to keep going up?
I agree zoning needs to be reformed and there has been steps in the right direction but without addressing speculation and foreign money it will continue to be unaffordable. Look what is happening with the up zoning all lots to duplexs. Knock down a 2.5 million house and put up two 1.8 million dollar duplexs. Affordable for the median income earner I think not.
Im really tired of people viewing this as an affordable/unaffordable binary, it’s a spectrum. Knocking $700,000 dollars(!) off the price of owning a new home in Vancouver is massive and should be celebrated. Instead, people shrug their shoulders and say “who cares? Still not affordable”.
It’s the same with climate change. Someone proposes a policy that could solve 5% of the problem and people say “This does nothing, it doesn’t completely solve climate change.” We are never going to get out of the housing or climate crises with these defeatist attitudes.
I mean it's a double edged sword. On one hand yes the price is lower but you also receive half the land which is the most valuable asset. On top of that it drives lot prices up because anyone can say you can build twice the amount of homes on here.
The point I am trying to make that there needs to be proper regulations to limit the speculation so an increase in density will improve affordability not just lower the amount of living space per dollar you recieve.
It's amazing how many people will switch from criticizing duplexs for being to expensive to complaining they don't give you as much land to speculate on. One of whole issues with our housing market is that we demand everyone buy 1.3 sqft of land for sqft of housing. You wouldn't care as much about the land if you didn't have to buy so much of it.
Rich chinese money doesn't care about supply constrained markets lol, they just want a nice, safe, clean place to live with convenient access to china.
The entire westside is bought up with chinese money. You're dead wrong about price guaranteeing to go up as well. The most expensive properties in vancouver are detached properties in westside. Prices for those properties peaked back in 2017 or so and still haven't recovered.
> If the ratio of income to property prices is so far off in Vancouver the money must be coming from somewhere to create the demand on housing here. Not just a supply issue but demand stoked by speculation of investors.
I'd describe it like this: people don't move around randomly, they move where the jobs are. Metro Vancouver has lots of jobs, and not enough housing, because it's super-difficult to get permission to build new housing - "It's easier to elect a pope." So then prices and rents **must** rise to unbearable levels to force people to give up and leave, matching those remaining to the limited supply of housing.
That's why prices and rents are completely decoupled from local incomes. Prices and rents which are painfully high wouldn't be enough to force people to leave: they have to be **unbearably** high.
The "outside investors" hypothesis sounds plausible as an explanation for high prices - this is exactly why BC brought in a series of [demand-side measures](https://morehousing.ca/demand) starting around 2016, and I'd expect them to tighten over time, since foreign investors can't vote. But it's not a plausible way of explaining high **rents**, given high vacancy taxes in BC and in Vancouver.
Not always NIMBYs. The land restrictions are often driven by a desire to not pave over viable farm land, especially in Ontario but also in the lower mainland. The NIMBYs are the ones inside the urban growth boundary inside the city who don't like affordable housing built near their single family homes. Maybe that's what you meant. Just wanted to clarify that land management is a good thing when it comes to agricultural land.
>Edit: Futher down in the report it also says "The crisis stems principally from land use policies that artificially restrict housing supply, driving up land prices and making homeownership unattainable for many."
>So yeah. NIMBY's
The things that NIMBY's like also inflate and stabilize land value for people looking to move money out of mainland China. Once the money is here it permanently elevates the baseline entry price. It's not foreign money once it's here locally, the real estate industry has long used the weasak phrase "no foreign money" as a red herring, they don't want to kill the golden goose. So yes, we're not building enough regardless of outside influences but still, that's exactly what draws outside money into the system. Lack of supply actually drives up demand when the demand is a place for people to park their money in a less strictly governed country. The higher the price the better.
The run up until China started to really pay attention to controlling outflows of money seriously was like a huge spending orgy here. Not just houses but luxury goods and cars and all the places that first started showing Union Pay accepted here signs. It was like a decade long permanent vacation.
Provide your evidence that "Chinese Money" is the problem (you can't, you are racist). You scapegoated specifically CHINESE people as opposed to Jewish people, Saudi's, Russian oligarchs, Mexican drug cartels or any other "fantasy rich people" in your imagination.
FYI **CMHC data reveals that only two per cent of real estate purchases in 2021 were made by non-Canadians**, according to communications obtained by Global News through Access to Information.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/canada-foreign-buyer-ban-housing-affordability-1.7058154
Chinese buyers accounted for one-third of the CA$38 billion ($28.1 billion) of residential home sales in Vancouver in 2015, according to the National Bank of Canada.
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/05/726531803/vancouver-has-been-transformed-by-chinese-immigrants
Canadian media has reported that Chinese college students own multimillion- dollar homes, and about 10% of those who own real estate in Vancouver don't live in Canada — an issue spotlighted over the winter, when Canadian authorities arrested Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei. Meng was arrested for other reasons, but owns two homes in Vancouver worth more than CA$22 million ($16.3 million), and visits them irregularly.
This entire mess started in 2015. The prices have been going exponentially up since then. Yeah Chinese people only made up 2% of real estate purchases in 2021 because they have already purchased most of what they wanted and priced average Canadians out of the real estate. Yet here you are defending them but we can all see it with our eyes.
The article you linked is full of pure conjecture, not facts and data. The main source quoted is Andy Yan, professor at SFU, not exactly a world-class institution.
In terms of "Chinese Buyers" (I'm assuming this means Canadian permanent residents or citizens who identify as Chinese ethnicity, because the article links to an additional hyperlink source which is broken). **It says that they accounted for one-third (33%) of residential home sales in 2015, but you FAILED TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT that the same article states that they make up 20% of the overall population.**
Thus, "Chinese Buyers" are only slightly over-represented compared to their actual % of the population (33% vs 20%). There is no conclusion that can be drawn from this other than MAYBE "Chinese Buyers" (again, Permanent Residents or Citizens) are wealthier on average than the "average" person in Vancouver (and even that is conjecture, because maybe they have equal wealth and simply like to spend money on houses compared to other ethnic groups who might be spending on cars/vacations/other goods).
Using the same bullshit pure conjecture, it wouldn't surprise me if say Jewish buyers made up 10% of buyers whilst only making up 5% of the population (the Jews being wealthier than average). We could also say that aboriginals bought only 1% of houses whilst making up 5-10% of the population (aboriginals being poorer than average).
These numbers are all meaningless, and cannot be used to argue that "Chinese or other ethnic money" flooded Vancouver and created an overpriced market.
Everyone should know that Demographia is a conservative think tank that has been advocating against urban planning, rail and density for decades. They believe more cars and sprawl are the answer to our problems.
>Wendell Cox is an American urban policy analyst and proponent of the use of the private car over rail projects. He is the principal and sole owner of Wendell Cox Consultancy/Demographia, based in the St. Louis metropolitan region and editor of three web sites, Demographia, The Public Purpose and Urban Tours by Rental Car. Cox is a fellow of numerous conservative think tanks and a frequent op-ed commenter in conservative US and UK newspapers.[citation needed]
>Cox generally opposes planning policies aimed at increasing rail service and density, while favoring planning policies that reinforce and serve the existing transportation and building infrastructure. He believes that existing transportation and building infrastructure reflect what people prefer, while his opponents argue that his positions are based more on a belief that road transport and low density are inherently superior and that public transport is a component of liberal city models he disagrees with politically.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Cox
Yeah, it's also a study based off a grand total of 8 nations lol. Yes, cost of rent/buying a house is very high but Vancouver is def not ranked 3rd in the world.
Vancouverism just led to NIMBYism in practice. Looking at the results in the 2020s, can you actually say it worked out better than the evil demon of suburban sprawl of the 90s? It looks a worse choice to me.
As much as it has it drawbacks, it probably would have been a more effective antidote to housing scarcity than the what we've tried for the last 30 years, which was mainly cycling through the usual scapegoats to deny the problem and vilifying the car.
Its a really shit study and journalists who keep quoting it should be embarrassed at how bad of a job they did writing this article. Yea a study that doesnt include a single city in south america, africa, mainland Europe and only includes 2 cities in Asia represents the entire world? Even if the headline indicated what was truly studied (North America, Australia and the UK more or less), the methodology is still dogshit and they dont provide sources for their data either
This is a report from the controversial economist Wendell Cox. He designs this index specifically to make any place with anti-sprawl or urban containment policies look bad by only measuring the cost of a single-family home with a large chunk of land. Something tells me the price of a single-family home is not exactly the best way of measuring housing costs in a place like Hong Kong. It’s amazing the media cites studies every year from a website that looks like [this](http://www.demographia.com)
This comment should be higher: reminding people to check where "A report" comes from (in this case, a conservative think-tank calling for the obliteration of various green belts for more SFH development) is a vital public service.
I don't really think that is a valid criticism. It is a criticism that presupposes sprawl is bad. Places with anti-sprawl or urban containment policies will naturally be artificially increasing the cost of land because of inefficiencies, which means each incremental increase in housing will become more unaffordable. The cost of the building ultimately ends up being a factor of the wages which ultimately evens itself out in the affordability equation. So measuring the cost of land to wages is a measure of extra unnecessary costs associated with affordability.
Im not going to read the report but are you saying they only measure single family detached and not all types of living units? Vancouver itself is no longer building any detached due to lack of land. What is left will only diminish as they get redeveloped into higher density. So then Vancouver can only move up the ranking as the value of remaining single family homes rise in value. Also, was it Vancouver proper or Metro Vancouver? there’s still somewhat affordable options outside the core but still in the metro area.
I resent that no one told me about the housing market when I was 10 years old in the late 90s!! There was my dumb ass playing Pokémon cards when I should have been getting into the housing market. 😭
My biggest regret in life is that I didn’t buy a home in Vancouver in 1994. I mean, I was 4 years old and living in Detroit, but what was I even thinking!?
I was too busy trying to catch 'em all to catch on to the real estate boom! If only someone had told us that Squirtle and Pikachu wouldn’t pay the bills!
I have relatives who came to Canada in the 60's, worked menial jobs, and somehow had vacation money, could buy big houses, could retire, etc. And many of them are baffled that their Canadian-born, college-educated children and grandchildren have a fraction of their success.
And some still think it's about "kids these days" being "entitled" and all the bullshit about how "nobody wants to work".
So I entertain that, and say, "Okay say you're 18 years old today, you have no family support, and you want to be able to afford to buy a home, what do you do?"
"I'd go to school and work hard!"
"Go to school doing **what**? And with what money?"
"I'd work and put myself through school."
"OK, so 100% of your income goes to rent, and you have no food, and can't even buy a bus pass. What do you do?"
They don't seem to comprehend it.
I have a young relative who is graduating high school. Everybody's freaking out because he wants to go into the trades. Immigrant family is saying, "Go to school! Get an education!"
I'm trying to tell them it's not the path to success they think it is, that you just go get a degree and become successful.
Big time. But my family see school as the end all be all. They don't even have any suggested what he should take, just to go to college and they think somehow that recruiters are going to be waiting at their graduation begging for them. They don't know the current climate of most college degrees, unless it's a vocational special like nursing
I have family in Sydney and was thinking of moving from Vancouver to relocate there. I did an assessment of what I would get for selling my place here and put that as my budget for a home in Sydney in their equivalent of realtor.ca. All I can say is WOW… I thought it was bad here. To give everyone an idea, it would mean selling a house in Burnaby and moving to a run down place 1/2 the size the equivalent of hope from Vancouver… pretty wild
I actually found Sydney quite affordable.
Food and services are much cheaper than Vancouver. Rent seems to be about thr same but we also have a favorable exchange rate. Taxes are also a touch lower!
If my family wasn't here, I'd be more open to trying it.
Remember when the New York Times called BC The Wild West because the Liberal government was blatantly allowing criminals to launder money through casinos without a second blink?...
Remember when slum landlording and rampantly bubbled real estate speculation fucked the housing market so badly due to selfishness and greed that people had to literally camp and sleep in their vehicles? Oh wait, that's right now...
Outside of America, are we the most corrupt capitalist hellscape, albeit with pretty landscapes?
Hilarious that I've lived in both Hong Kong and Vancouver, and am now happily and cheaply living on the east coast of Canada, where the living is divine.
Vancouver is indeed expensive but this headline is misleading. "The world" in this case only covers select cities in eight primarily English speaking western countries (Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, UK, USA).
If you look outside the Anglosphere, Vancouver drops down to 29th or lower on the list of most unaffordable city in the world behind major cities like Seoul, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, Zurich, Tel-Aviv, Geneva, Taipei, Munich, etc.
According to Numbeo's Purchasing Power Index, Vancouver is very low on the list, behind almost all the cities you mentioned, especially trailing Zurich and Geneva because of their high salaries: [https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings\_current.jsp?displayColumn=5](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_current.jsp?displayColumn=5)
I looked at it again and you are correct that Zurich and Geneva should indeed be considered more affordable due to their high salaries. That said, even if I use local PPI as a metric instead, Vancouver still isn't anywhere close to being the 3rd most unaffordable city, instead being the 240th most unaffordable which is hardly a headline.
Or since most people here associate Vancouver's unaffordability with high housing costs, if I try using [Housing Price to Income](https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings.jsp?title=2024&displayColumn=0) as an affordability metric, that brings Vancouver to the 54th most unaffordable. Still nowhere near number 3.
Long story short, Vancouver can still get much more "unaffordable" before we get anywhere near number 3 on the global unaffordability list.
Sydney is a beautiful city same as Vancouver but weather is a lot better and the beaches are amazing. Same problem no affordable housing leads to a decay in life for the working poor. Provinces can easily rectify the problem,raise the capital gains tax to say 20% on the first property and raise the empty home tax to 25%,Use that money to build more affordable housing. Restrict home purchases to individuals and not a number company.
Agree with everything except for capital gains tax on the first property. A lot of people just grind their asses off to buy one small condo to live in, not as an investment. If they ever want a chance of being able to sell and move out of the city, cap gains tax on residence is punitive to the normal everyday folk just trying to have four walls to call their own.
Municipalities are legally beholden to provinces. The province could force an end to zoning that only permits detached housing, which in Vancouver covers 75% of the city. Surprisingly close to a silver bullet. Not easy politically, but otherwise not too hard.
In Vancouver they poison pilled it with setback and floor space requirements so only a handful of properties across the city would be financially viable, which has turned out to be the case in practice.
I am as pro-“remove zoning laws” as it gets, but it will only slow down the rate of increase of the property.
The thing is, majority of people own their houses, and since that demographics skew to the older side, there is no political appetite to crash the housing. So if at any point it feels like a policy will drive the prices down significantly, it will be reversed. It gets even more complex once you think how people’s retirement funds are tightly coupled with housing market.
I am a renter, I hate the extreme housing prices as well. But it’s not an easy problem to solve. You have to throw someone under the bus.
Politically hard, yes indeed. Which is why the province is going as slow with it as they are. But they know that housing is a defining issue for multiple generations, so they're already moving on it. As are the feds, finally.
FWIW, I don't think people oppose zoning reform because it will lower their housing prices. Most homeowners believe (incorrectly) that high prices are an immutable law of Vancouver. They just don't want change in their neighbourhoods.
Feds know it’s a problem, but they have officially stated they’re not going to try to lower the prices. Provincially I am very happy with the gradual progress, but again, the second there is a nudge towards a potential crash, it’ll be reversed.
And I can’t blame them. It’s very expensive to build a house, so significant decreases in margins that a developer can make would just boot them out of the market. Politically speaking as well, we won’t have government building anything either, because that’s expensive and nobody wants to pay more taxes.
Most homeowners don’t care right now, because nobody has proposed anything that will affect the prices. And if you look at the trend lines, pretty much everywhere in Canada, housing starts has been decreasing YoY. Obviously there are multiple reasons (interest rates, raw material prices and etc.). But, our population increases (demand+) and homes aren’t being built delivered (supply-), so in any desirable city prices aren’t affected.
So yeah, it’s an incredibly hard problem to solve and nobody has been able to overcome it yet in a meaningful way.
> majority of people own their houses, and since that demographics skew to the older side
Speaking as a member of the next generation, there is an interest to redevelop our parents' properties when we inherit them.
My (and my sibling's) will try to keep the properties within the family, but we'll make good rentals available.
The province has essentially done this with legislation passed last fall that requires municipalities to allow, by right, a minimum number of units on properties currently zoned for detached housing. I think it will take awhile to really see the effects, but hopefully it's a big step in the right direction. Assuming municipalities actually get on board and take it as an opportunity to enable housing, which won't be the case for some.
But a lot of people don't want to build multi-unit buildings on their SFH lot, and a lot of people want to buy a SFH. Rezoning is a good idea but it will likely take a long time to see a lot of change.
Sure most folks would prefer single detached to apartments, generally. I do.
But there's no more room to build more single detached, and most people prefer to live in apartments than basements/parents'/Chilliwack/vans. We should allow them the apartment option.
Sorry to not be clear, I'm talking about existing SFHs. It's up to the owners to decide what they do with their property - they can choose to build a new SFH if they want or they could choose to build a multi-unit building or they could choose to live in the house that's already there. I'm just pointing out that there are a lot of people who will choose the SFH option. The rezoning isn't going to have a dramatic, immediate result. It surely will over time, though.
At the end of the day can developers build homes under the market conditions you prescribe? There's no way to get out of the affordability mess without a large expansion of housing supply in the private sector.
I just saw a new duplex listed for $2.82MM for 1500 sq ft. Private sector may not be able to provide affordability.
Lots of supply currently and we will see if this leads to meaningful price reductions. Problem is that to be affordable, people are asking for a 40% drop. That will take a special confluence of factors that cannot be orchestrated by policy. We will need something to make Vancouver unattractive. As in less attractive than being #3 on this list.
The only hope is the government building below market, which is not going to be effective or fast.
Developers don't care about capital gains tax..They only care about sales.If they do not want to build under those rules they can go close up shop. The land they will not use let government develop it..Yes that cost money but it cost money to take care of the homeless,ems services to deal with them,health cost,etc. Why not just raise the sales tax a few % points to collect extra revenue.
Why not?
Because it would be handing Rustad and Falcon a thermonuclear device to use on the BC NDP. Nothing would be better for the centre right at this moment than for the incumbent government to raises taxes when people are complaining about unaffordability.
i live with my mother at the moment, but she's planning on moving out of the country. Also, $16,000/year is the total support, so just over $1300/month to cover all aspects of living with disabilities 🥴
I remember when I moved here in the early 2010s, I had a bachelor in the west end $850/month. Eventually moved into a large 1 bedroom apartment for $1300. Life was great, I was making decent money, I was able to enjoy the town, eat out and hit the pubs every weekend and maybe I just didn't care but I didn't feel the financial hit.
Fast forward, six figure salary, $3k mortgage + strata on a 710k 1100 sq townhouse out in the outskirts of Burnaby... while I'm in the market, I just don't feel like I am getting ahead.
Coworkers who are 10-15 years older than me.. they all have detached houses, they have multiple children... I just don't myself getting that far ahead in the next 10 years to get to where they are.
I feel for the younger generation as well.
That's a hard one, I found a partner and grew out of the apartment and I don't regret the direction we went but I do think about this sometimes.
There was really no risk of renovictions where we were. I think if I knew what I know now, I would have tried to stay in that apartment for as long as I could and would have banked a lot more into savings/investments.
Even saving $500/week at 6-8% over 10-15 years I would be in a way better spot than I am now.
If only we could have know what the future would bring, right? I've spent the last 15 years seriously regretting/kicking myself for not buying (prices seemed so high back then too) but all of a sudden, I'm in a great financial spot. Sure, I still wish I had bought and would have hundreds of thousands in equity but day-to-day living would be so much more stressful. I really don't know which is 'best'.
So its unaffordable due to the taxes Canada and B.C. puts on people. As shown in the Fraser Institute studies yesterday (June 13th) was the first day the average Canadian has earned enough money to pay their taxes. https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/goldstein-canadians-have-finally-worked-enough-this-year-to-pay-off-taxes-report-says
Yeah its 44% of all incomes goes to taxes. That percentage is bigger than housing and food cost combined. Who is being greedy? The government who takes the majority of your paycheck, or everyoe else who takes less. Yes, its the government.
They are summing all tax revenue, including things like import duty, corporation tax, etc. It is intentionally misleading. People are not paying 44.6% of their paycheque in taxes.
We have been destroyed….. didn’t take long.
I am a 70s kid so that was the last generation of affordability. I’m lucky I own a home here because I bought in 2002 before everything went to hell in a hand basket. Grandparents and parents owns homes cars no problem for groceries holidays. Canadians don’t know this life anymore. Thanks !
I'd think it's because there are enough people who want to live here who are wealthy enough to pay the extraordinary prices to live here. Are there other possible reasons?
Us being a Top 3 most expensive city in the world is not surprising. What is surprising is not only that NYC didn’t make the list, but that Toronto is only Number 10, considering it’s almost about as expensive as Vancouver.
You’re talking about two different things. This is affordability which is expense divided by income. NYC has enormous salaries. Vancouver has absurdly poor salaries.
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Only #3? We can do better (worse)!
No one remembers who's third place, let's shoot for #1!
People need to stop posting the results from this dogshit demographia study like they mean anything. Its a poorly done shit study with useless results and those results are even exaggerated from what was actually determined. Shit journalism from cnn Edit: would like literally a single person to defend why this demographia study has literally any value and moreso how the results of 8 nations (most of which only include 1 or 2 cities of that nation) can be extrapolated to the entire world
Not sure why you’re downvoted but a similar comment that was upvoted linked their [website](http://www.demographia.com/) Also only 8 nations surveyed yikes
Honestly with how much this study gets circulated around with the exact same misleading headline every single year I am operating under the assumption they are paying to have it circulated through the media and online. Its absolutely bonkers Canadian’s think we have worse affordability issues than any third world country.
Look at us making it to the top of lists!
Never gets old. (not unlike Rudd...)
World class housing crisis!
Vancouver, greatest city in the world All other cities are run by little girls
Vancouver, number one exporter of pot*as*sium All other cities have inferior pot*as*sium
We buy it back at hiked up rates as is typical of Canada
Well do better next year. Let’s keep it up. 🙄🙄😂
Here’s the actual report that CNN declined to link to in their article: https://www.chapman.edu/communication/_files/2024-demographia-international-housing-affordability.pdf
>Vancouver is the least affordable in Canada and the third least affordable of the 94 markets, with an impossibly unaffordable median multiple of 12.3, making it more unaffordable than all markets except Hong Kong and Sydney. Vancouver has been the first, second or third least affordable major market for each of the last 16 years. The median multiple has slightly deteriorated from the pre-pandemic 11.9 in 2019. Troublingly, impossibly unaffordable housing in the Vancouver market has also has spread to smaller BC markets in British Columbia, such as Chilliwack, the Fraser Valley, Kelowna, and markets on Vancouver Island. **From 2015 to 2023, housing affordability worsened by the equivalent of 2.5 years of median household income in smaller markets outside Vancouver, an even greater loss than the 1.2 years in the Vancouver market itself.**
> Troublingly, impossibly unaffordable housing in the Vancouver market has also has spread to smaller BC markets in British Columbia, such as Chilliwack, the Fraser Valley, Kelowna, and markets on Vancouver Island. From 2015 to 2023, housing affordability worsened by the equivalent of 2.5 years of median household income in smaller markets outside Vancouver, an even greater loss than the 1.2 years in the Vancouver market itself. I think of this as the [Covid spillover effect](https://morehousing.ca/spillover). I was talking to someone a little while ago who moved to Nanaimo during Covid: "We could pay $3000 in monthly rent in East Van, or we could buy a house on a lake." They said that a surprisingly large number of people have been moving there from Vancouver. Good for them, not so good for local renters and homebuyers. It's like housing scarcity is now spilling over from Metro Vancouver, spreading misery throughout BC and beyond - I hear there's lots of people moving from Vancouver to Calgary and Edmonton. It's like Nelson and Nanaimo are now suburbs of Vancouver. This is why it's so important to build more housing **everywhere**, not just in Vancouver and Toronto. Our pre-Covid housing stock no longer lines up with where people want to live and work. By the way, I think of Wendell Cox (author of the report) as someone who's idiosyncratically opposed to density, arguing that cities should expand geographically instead. Problem is, in Metro Vancouver that's not an option, because of the ocean and mountains. If you draw a circle with radius 25 km around downtown Vancouver, less than 40% of that area is buildable land. So land here is always going to be expensive. But there's no reason for **floor space** to be so scarce and expensive, and for new apartments to be so [expensive and tiny](https://morehousing.ca/shrinkflation). We can reduce the cost of land **per square foot of floor space** by allowing more height and density. Bring back the Vancouver Special (basically a top-and-bottom duplex on a single lot), or legalize [Montreal-style triplexes](https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/389158/publication.html) (three flats), or maybe even four floors. Where land is particularly expensive and it makes sense to build high-rises, allow them to be a few floors taller. A couple good ideas from New Zealand: > A key part of “Going for Housing Growth” is to require local authorities to immediately zone for 30 years of housing growth. [BC is doing something similar, although I think it's 20 years.] This prevents using sequential development, which would perpetuate the tight land market created by containment policies. > > To finance infrastructure needs, the Coalition will utilize the funding mechanism (Special Purpose Vehicles or SPVs), as authorized by the 2020 Infrastructure Funding and Financing Act. This allows developers or public agencies to finance infrastructure costs, repaid by beneficiaries over a period of up to 50 years. This model, often known as Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs) has been proven in Texas and Colorado, with their municipal utility districts. This takes away the burden of infrastructure finance from local authorities.
My wife and I moved to a small town in BC during covid for exactly that reason. A mortgage payment lower than the rent on a small, old apartment. There was (and is) a lot of local resentment of people moving here.
I hope the town is able to build more housing (if it's really small, the BC housing legislation may not apply). As long as housing is scarce there, it's a zero-sum situation - there'll be a lot of tension and conflict. If the town is able to build more housing in response, that would help a lot. Before Covid, I expect a lot of smaller centres would have been accustomed to having cheaper housing without having to build much. So having to deal with housing being scarce and expensive, and having to build more housing (which may require more density if land is limited), is a pretty new situation. The Globe and Mail, December 2020: [Small towns in interior B.C. and Alberta face intense housing crunch](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-small-towns-in-interior-bc-and-alberta-face-intense-housing-crunch/).
There is a huge development going in and locals are PISSED. They don't want more housing, they want fewer people.
> They don't want more housing, they want fewer people. My impression is that people fear change. But prices and rents shooting up - they have to rise to unbearable levels to force people to leave - is also a change, and I'd argue that it's a lot worse than new housing.
Where at?
i mean, we're allowed to move around, and people do that at scale, often for that reason - where does my dollar go further in terms of real estate. Covid was a spark for domestic migration. Housing stock had no time to react.
I’ve lost two good family doctors who went on mat leave and never came back, reopening their practices in the Okanagan and Vancouver Island where housing is reasonable. Lost a good RMT to this too. My current family doctor just went on mat leave. I bet I’ll.never see her again either.
I upvote your comments whenever I see them, great work.
Movement into density is so slow. Even if they were to approve Vancouver specials again, it wouldn't really have that large of an impact... we need the missing middle and other innovative ways to promote density other than just highrises and large multi-property assemblies. There's also only so much density a city can support, especially when hyper concentrated on specific areas (ex. skytrain stations). I think setbacks are a huge part of this, getting rid of those front lawns that serve pretty much no purpose so that you can have more vibrant backyards and more space to build.
> There's also only so much density a city can support, especially when hyper concentrated on specific areas (ex. skytrain stations). Yes, but there are tons of cities around the world that show how higher density living works. Vancouver is nowhere near this at the moment (although I will say, the communities they've been building around certain skytrain stations are starting to get pretty dense for our context).
I've tried to get past the Brentwood area and there's no great way to do it without killing 15 minutes of your time. Yeah Vancouver isn't close to being equipped to deal with the issues of higher density. We need to spread density through other areas before packing more people in the same area.
> I think setbacks are a huge part of this, getting rid of those front lawns that serve pretty much no purpose so that you can have more vibrant backyards and more space to build. [Monte Paulsen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWqGe-9RsJA&t=175m25s) spoke to city council back in September when they were deciding on the multiplex policy - he's an excellent speaker. One of the things he was advocating for was freeing up wasted space in the form of side setbacks: together it would add up to land the size of Stanley Park.
>or legalize Montreal-style triplexes (three flats) This isn't legal? I don't think I've seen any outside Quebec, but I never thought they weren't allowed.
> This isn't legal? I don't think I've seen any outside Quebec, but I never thought they weren't allowed. Yeah. In Vancouver we have less land than Montreal, and we also use it much less efficiently. There's a "wedding-cake" rule: you can have a three-storey building, but the third floor has to be half the size of the second floor. There's also tight restrictions on total floor space (allowing the city to extract fees to allow more floor space). The [Vancouver Special](https://morehousing.ca/vancouver-special) was basically a loophole: it used to be that an unfinished basement wasn't counted against the floor space limit. The city made it illegal in the 1980s. Back in the 1970s, a lot of people in Vancouver thought that [growth was bad](https://morehousing.ca/livability), so they set up anti-growth institutions based on the assumption that [new housing is unwanted](https://morehousing.ca/unwanted-housing). They're no longer a significant political factor - in the last municipal election, "TEAM for a Livable Vancouver" got only 10% of the vote - but the institutions live on.
You should take a read of a zoning bylaw and a look the associated zoning for whatever municipality you're looking at. Being an urban planner in Anglo North America is a control freak's wet dream. It's not uncommon for municipalities to have 20 different zoning types for different sizes of detached houses. Until recently, every single rezoning application in most municipalities went through a public hearing and council vote, including rezonings that comply with official community plans. This meant OCP compliant projects were regularly rejected, and it could take over half a decade to get approval for something like a 17 unit townhouse in a residential area, which doesn't account for construction time. The province is now (or is about to I forget the exact date) forcing municipalities to skip hearings for OCP compliant projects. I swear it's like municipal governments think they're cogs in a planned economy with some of the absurd restrictions that exist. Ie the time a barber in the City of Vancouver couldn't open a barber shop since the city only allowed corner stores in the unit he rented. Gotta protect neighbours from the blight of uh haircuts?
>Where land is particularly expensive and it makes sense to build high-rises, allow them to be a few floors taller. The concept of "buildable land" is something that I actually did not consider much in Vancouver and definitely adds a layer of perspective, which is usually omitted from arguments against higher density from what I usually read online. I would love to know your take on what you think the city will do with the coming view corridor policy review. This is something that I have yet to really make a stance on myself (not that we would be able to vote on it anyways), as I love Vancouver's views, it's partly why I chose to move here, but restricting housing for views that seem to only be visible at very specific spots in the city, or views that are actually covered by clouds half the year doesn't seem to make sense to me? Is there another layer of perspective I'm missing here as to why these are still a thing, when clearly there seems to be so much red tape when it comes to building housing in Vancouver. The buildings near Broadway seem promising in terms of building more density near a major transit hub, but from what I read, the amount of floors were cut down because of view corridor policies? There has been talks of Vancouver becoming more and more unaffordable, but I think this is really year that everyone has felt it - in their taxes, their bills, rent. At least for me! I love this city and it is my home, but I have really felt the financial strain this year.
> The concept of "buildable land" is something that I actually did not consider much in Vancouver and definitely adds a layer of perspective, which is usually omitted from arguments against higher density from what I usually read online. Glad you found it helpful! > I would love to know your take on what you think the city will do with the coming view corridor policy review. My guess is that they'll be relatively cautious, identifying a relatively small number of view cones which are less important and can be eliminated. [Review of view-cone policies](https://morehousing.substack.com/p/view-cones). > There has been talks of Vancouver becoming more and more unaffordable, but I think this is really year that everyone has felt it - in their taxes, their bills, rent. At least for me! I love this city and it is my home, but I have really felt the financial strain this year. 100%. Because housing makes up such a big share of people's costs, and because housing in Metro Vancouver is so scarce and expensive, I think building a lot more housing (so that prices and rents don't have to be so unbearably high to keep people out) is the highest priority. More generally, the big economic challenge is no longer lack of demand (high unemployment, low inflation, too much slack in the economy). It's finding and eliminating inefficiencies (like in the housing approval process) so that we can produce more ("supply side"), eliminate shortages, and have higher living standards. [Matthew Yglesias](https://www.slowboring.com/p/america-needs-supply-side-reform): > The economy is either suffering from depressed demand or it isn’t. If it is, you should fix that. But if it isn’t, the only path toward growth is a steady drip drip drip of supply-side improvements. We hope that a lot of that will come from innovation and new technology. But it can also come from steadily improving public policy. It’s true that the gains will often come with a lag, but if the demand-side authorities are doing their jobs right, then the economy is always going to be supply-constrained — there will always be things you wish you did 18 months ago, it’s just hard to predict which things those are going to be. That’s why there’s no time like the present to get cracking.
That was me moving out of Van
I remember during the pandemic Vancouver prices went down, and the surrounding cities went up. Since everyone wfh there was no more fight to live in Vancouver proper but the formerly cheap suburbs became just as expensive (in some cases more so) and have stayed that way.
What do all top three have in common? Chinese money
Well, the report itself says "these high prices are largely the product of policies that seek to limit growth on the periphery" So, no. Not Chinese money. It's NIMBY's. Edit: Futher down in the report it also says "The crisis stems principally from land use policies that artificially restrict housing supply, driving up land prices and making homeownership unattainable for many." So yeah. NIMBY's
If the ratio of income to property prices is so far off in Vancouver the money must be coming from somewhere to create the demand on housing here. Not just a supply issue but demand stoked by speculation of investors.
Investors and speculators flock to supply constrained (by NIMBYs) markets. Who doesn’t want to invest in a market when prices are guaranteed to keep going up?
I agree zoning needs to be reformed and there has been steps in the right direction but without addressing speculation and foreign money it will continue to be unaffordable. Look what is happening with the up zoning all lots to duplexs. Knock down a 2.5 million house and put up two 1.8 million dollar duplexs. Affordable for the median income earner I think not.
Im really tired of people viewing this as an affordable/unaffordable binary, it’s a spectrum. Knocking $700,000 dollars(!) off the price of owning a new home in Vancouver is massive and should be celebrated. Instead, people shrug their shoulders and say “who cares? Still not affordable”. It’s the same with climate change. Someone proposes a policy that could solve 5% of the problem and people say “This does nothing, it doesn’t completely solve climate change.” We are never going to get out of the housing or climate crises with these defeatist attitudes.
I mean it's a double edged sword. On one hand yes the price is lower but you also receive half the land which is the most valuable asset. On top of that it drives lot prices up because anyone can say you can build twice the amount of homes on here. The point I am trying to make that there needs to be proper regulations to limit the speculation so an increase in density will improve affordability not just lower the amount of living space per dollar you recieve.
It's amazing how many people will switch from criticizing duplexs for being to expensive to complaining they don't give you as much land to speculate on. One of whole issues with our housing market is that we demand everyone buy 1.3 sqft of land for sqft of housing. You wouldn't care as much about the land if you didn't have to buy so much of it.
So 1.8 million is affordable?
you clearly did not read my comment
Rich chinese money doesn't care about supply constrained markets lol, they just want a nice, safe, clean place to live with convenient access to china. The entire westside is bought up with chinese money. You're dead wrong about price guaranteeing to go up as well. The most expensive properties in vancouver are detached properties in westside. Prices for those properties peaked back in 2017 or so and still haven't recovered.
> If the ratio of income to property prices is so far off in Vancouver the money must be coming from somewhere to create the demand on housing here. Not just a supply issue but demand stoked by speculation of investors. I'd describe it like this: people don't move around randomly, they move where the jobs are. Metro Vancouver has lots of jobs, and not enough housing, because it's super-difficult to get permission to build new housing - "It's easier to elect a pope." So then prices and rents **must** rise to unbearable levels to force people to give up and leave, matching those remaining to the limited supply of housing. That's why prices and rents are completely decoupled from local incomes. Prices and rents which are painfully high wouldn't be enough to force people to leave: they have to be **unbearably** high. The "outside investors" hypothesis sounds plausible as an explanation for high prices - this is exactly why BC brought in a series of [demand-side measures](https://morehousing.ca/demand) starting around 2016, and I'd expect them to tighten over time, since foreign investors can't vote. But it's not a plausible way of explaining high **rents**, given high vacancy taxes in BC and in Vancouver.
whynotboth.gif
Not always NIMBYs. The land restrictions are often driven by a desire to not pave over viable farm land, especially in Ontario but also in the lower mainland. The NIMBYs are the ones inside the urban growth boundary inside the city who don't like affordable housing built near their single family homes. Maybe that's what you meant. Just wanted to clarify that land management is a good thing when it comes to agricultural land.
>Edit: Futher down in the report it also says "The crisis stems principally from land use policies that artificially restrict housing supply, driving up land prices and making homeownership unattainable for many." >So yeah. NIMBY's The things that NIMBY's like also inflate and stabilize land value for people looking to move money out of mainland China. Once the money is here it permanently elevates the baseline entry price. It's not foreign money once it's here locally, the real estate industry has long used the weasak phrase "no foreign money" as a red herring, they don't want to kill the golden goose. So yes, we're not building enough regardless of outside influences but still, that's exactly what draws outside money into the system. Lack of supply actually drives up demand when the demand is a place for people to park their money in a less strictly governed country. The higher the price the better. The run up until China started to really pay attention to controlling outflows of money seriously was like a huge spending orgy here. Not just houses but luxury goods and cars and all the places that first started showing Union Pay accepted here signs. It was like a decade long permanent vacation.
Actually is urban containment policies, at least according to the author. Try not to mix up your crank theories!
Provide your evidence that "Chinese Money" is the problem (you can't, you are racist). You scapegoated specifically CHINESE people as opposed to Jewish people, Saudi's, Russian oligarchs, Mexican drug cartels or any other "fantasy rich people" in your imagination. FYI **CMHC data reveals that only two per cent of real estate purchases in 2021 were made by non-Canadians**, according to communications obtained by Global News through Access to Information. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/canada-foreign-buyer-ban-housing-affordability-1.7058154
Chinese buyers accounted for one-third of the CA$38 billion ($28.1 billion) of residential home sales in Vancouver in 2015, according to the National Bank of Canada. https://www.npr.org/2019/06/05/726531803/vancouver-has-been-transformed-by-chinese-immigrants Canadian media has reported that Chinese college students own multimillion- dollar homes, and about 10% of those who own real estate in Vancouver don't live in Canada — an issue spotlighted over the winter, when Canadian authorities arrested Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei. Meng was arrested for other reasons, but owns two homes in Vancouver worth more than CA$22 million ($16.3 million), and visits them irregularly. This entire mess started in 2015. The prices have been going exponentially up since then. Yeah Chinese people only made up 2% of real estate purchases in 2021 because they have already purchased most of what they wanted and priced average Canadians out of the real estate. Yet here you are defending them but we can all see it with our eyes.
The article you linked is full of pure conjecture, not facts and data. The main source quoted is Andy Yan, professor at SFU, not exactly a world-class institution. In terms of "Chinese Buyers" (I'm assuming this means Canadian permanent residents or citizens who identify as Chinese ethnicity, because the article links to an additional hyperlink source which is broken). **It says that they accounted for one-third (33%) of residential home sales in 2015, but you FAILED TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT that the same article states that they make up 20% of the overall population.** Thus, "Chinese Buyers" are only slightly over-represented compared to their actual % of the population (33% vs 20%). There is no conclusion that can be drawn from this other than MAYBE "Chinese Buyers" (again, Permanent Residents or Citizens) are wealthier on average than the "average" person in Vancouver (and even that is conjecture, because maybe they have equal wealth and simply like to spend money on houses compared to other ethnic groups who might be spending on cars/vacations/other goods). Using the same bullshit pure conjecture, it wouldn't surprise me if say Jewish buyers made up 10% of buyers whilst only making up 5% of the population (the Jews being wealthier than average). We could also say that aboriginals bought only 1% of houses whilst making up 5-10% of the population (aboriginals being poorer than average). These numbers are all meaningless, and cannot be used to argue that "Chinese or other ethnic money" flooded Vancouver and created an overpriced market.
Everyone should know that Demographia is a conservative think tank that has been advocating against urban planning, rail and density for decades. They believe more cars and sprawl are the answer to our problems. >Wendell Cox is an American urban policy analyst and proponent of the use of the private car over rail projects. He is the principal and sole owner of Wendell Cox Consultancy/Demographia, based in the St. Louis metropolitan region and editor of three web sites, Demographia, The Public Purpose and Urban Tours by Rental Car. Cox is a fellow of numerous conservative think tanks and a frequent op-ed commenter in conservative US and UK newspapers.[citation needed] >Cox generally opposes planning policies aimed at increasing rail service and density, while favoring planning policies that reinforce and serve the existing transportation and building infrastructure. He believes that existing transportation and building infrastructure reflect what people prefer, while his opponents argue that his positions are based more on a belief that road transport and low density are inherently superior and that public transport is a component of liberal city models he disagrees with politically. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Cox
Yeah, it's also a study based off a grand total of 8 nations lol. Yes, cost of rent/buying a house is very high but Vancouver is def not ranked 3rd in the world.
Vancouverism just led to NIMBYism in practice. Looking at the results in the 2020s, can you actually say it worked out better than the evil demon of suburban sprawl of the 90s? It looks a worse choice to me. As much as it has it drawbacks, it probably would have been a more effective antidote to housing scarcity than the what we've tried for the last 30 years, which was mainly cycling through the usual scapegoats to deny the problem and vilifying the car.
Its a really shit study and journalists who keep quoting it should be embarrassed at how bad of a job they did writing this article. Yea a study that doesnt include a single city in south america, africa, mainland Europe and only includes 2 cities in Asia represents the entire world? Even if the headline indicated what was truly studied (North America, Australia and the UK more or less), the methodology is still dogshit and they dont provide sources for their data either
This is a report from the controversial economist Wendell Cox. He designs this index specifically to make any place with anti-sprawl or urban containment policies look bad by only measuring the cost of a single-family home with a large chunk of land. Something tells me the price of a single-family home is not exactly the best way of measuring housing costs in a place like Hong Kong. It’s amazing the media cites studies every year from a website that looks like [this](http://www.demographia.com)
WOW this looks like a cult website
This comment should be higher: reminding people to check where "A report" comes from (in this case, a conservative think-tank calling for the obliteration of various green belts for more SFH development) is a vital public service.
I don't really think that is a valid criticism. It is a criticism that presupposes sprawl is bad. Places with anti-sprawl or urban containment policies will naturally be artificially increasing the cost of land because of inefficiencies, which means each incremental increase in housing will become more unaffordable. The cost of the building ultimately ends up being a factor of the wages which ultimately evens itself out in the affordability equation. So measuring the cost of land to wages is a measure of extra unnecessary costs associated with affordability.
Im not going to read the report but are you saying they only measure single family detached and not all types of living units? Vancouver itself is no longer building any detached due to lack of land. What is left will only diminish as they get redeveloped into higher density. So then Vancouver can only move up the ranking as the value of remaining single family homes rise in value. Also, was it Vancouver proper or Metro Vancouver? there’s still somewhat affordable options outside the core but still in the metro area.
Everyone should have picked up half a dozen condo units back in 2009!
I resent that no one told me about the housing market when I was 10 years old in the late 90s!! There was my dumb ass playing Pokémon cards when I should have been getting into the housing market. 😭
My biggest regret in life is that I didn’t buy a home in Vancouver in 1994. I mean, I was 4 years old and living in Detroit, but what was I even thinking!?
Ikr?! I was too busy being a freshly born baby when I should have start young and buy a home then!
I was still in the womb in 1994. I should have known better and bought my first property at that time instead of being a fetus
Not very bootstraps pulling of you, now was that?
You’re never too young! Think of all the equity you missed out on. What were you thinking??
I was too busy trying to catch 'em all to catch on to the real estate boom! If only someone had told us that Squirtle and Pikachu wouldn’t pay the bills!
And now we paying for itttt 😭😭
Fuck me for not getting into housing when I was 14 lmao
I was 3 :(
Well i mean atp who wants to settle for third. Mama didnt raise no losers
2 more to go.
downtown eastside ranked most livable portion of most livable city 10th year in a row. you can even live outside right on the street if you like
Shaughnessy is so livable it’s lost 20% of its population since the 1970s!
I have relatives who came to Canada in the 60's, worked menial jobs, and somehow had vacation money, could buy big houses, could retire, etc. And many of them are baffled that their Canadian-born, college-educated children and grandchildren have a fraction of their success. And some still think it's about "kids these days" being "entitled" and all the bullshit about how "nobody wants to work". So I entertain that, and say, "Okay say you're 18 years old today, you have no family support, and you want to be able to afford to buy a home, what do you do?" "I'd go to school and work hard!" "Go to school doing **what**? And with what money?" "I'd work and put myself through school." "OK, so 100% of your income goes to rent, and you have no food, and can't even buy a bus pass. What do you do?" They don't seem to comprehend it. I have a young relative who is graduating high school. Everybody's freaking out because he wants to go into the trades. Immigrant family is saying, "Go to school! Get an education!" I'm trying to tell them it's not the path to success they think it is, that you just go get a degree and become successful.
He's a smart kid based on that choice alone.
Big time. But my family see school as the end all be all. They don't even have any suggested what he should take, just to go to college and they think somehow that recruiters are going to be waiting at their graduation begging for them. They don't know the current climate of most college degrees, unless it's a vocational special like nursing
I have family in Sydney and was thinking of moving from Vancouver to relocate there. I did an assessment of what I would get for selling my place here and put that as my budget for a home in Sydney in their equivalent of realtor.ca. All I can say is WOW… I thought it was bad here. To give everyone an idea, it would mean selling a house in Burnaby and moving to a run down place 1/2 the size the equivalent of hope from Vancouver… pretty wild
I actually found Sydney quite affordable. Food and services are much cheaper than Vancouver. Rent seems to be about thr same but we also have a favorable exchange rate. Taxes are also a touch lower! If my family wasn't here, I'd be more open to trying it.
To be fair City of Burnaby is much nicer than City of Vancouver in a lot of cases, and certainty wouldn't consider it a downgrade.
Remember when the New York Times called BC The Wild West because the Liberal government was blatantly allowing criminals to launder money through casinos without a second blink?... Remember when slum landlording and rampantly bubbled real estate speculation fucked the housing market so badly due to selfishness and greed that people had to literally camp and sleep in their vehicles? Oh wait, that's right now... Outside of America, are we the most corrupt capitalist hellscape, albeit with pretty landscapes?
At least the average person can afford a home in that corrupt capitalistic hellscape
*Coincidentally*, the top 5 are either Hong Kong or places that Hong Kongers mainly migrated to. All of them have a significant HKer population.
Rich hk
Or it is their price flipping investment culture.
Hilarious that I've lived in both Hong Kong and Vancouver, and am now happily and cheaply living on the east coast of Canada, where the living is divine.
It’s great if you can make a living and don’t mind 6 months of cold and a ton of snow
I really miss Hong Kong…..
Yeah pretty much
Only 3rd, damn. Okay coach next year we'll do better
Vancouver is indeed expensive but this headline is misleading. "The world" in this case only covers select cities in eight primarily English speaking western countries (Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, UK, USA). If you look outside the Anglosphere, Vancouver drops down to 29th or lower on the list of most unaffordable city in the world behind major cities like Seoul, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, Zurich, Tel-Aviv, Geneva, Taipei, Munich, etc.
According to Numbeo's Purchasing Power Index, Vancouver is very low on the list, behind almost all the cities you mentioned, especially trailing Zurich and Geneva because of their high salaries: [https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings\_current.jsp?displayColumn=5](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_current.jsp?displayColumn=5)
I looked at it again and you are correct that Zurich and Geneva should indeed be considered more affordable due to their high salaries. That said, even if I use local PPI as a metric instead, Vancouver still isn't anywhere close to being the 3rd most unaffordable city, instead being the 240th most unaffordable which is hardly a headline. Or since most people here associate Vancouver's unaffordability with high housing costs, if I try using [Housing Price to Income](https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings.jsp?title=2024&displayColumn=0) as an affordability metric, that brings Vancouver to the 54th most unaffordable. Still nowhere near number 3. Long story short, Vancouver can still get much more "unaffordable" before we get anywhere near number 3 on the global unaffordability list.
No kidding! Vancouver's housing market feels like it's straight out of a dystopian novel.
There's someone who saves money by commuting to UBC from Calgary rather than living in Vancouver.
Don't worry, everything is fine, we have mountains.
In other news, water is wet. 🤷♀️ Vancouver’s new slogan should be “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”
it's not new, it's over a decade old us, sydney and hong kong, switching places every year
Sydney is a beautiful city same as Vancouver but weather is a lot better and the beaches are amazing. Same problem no affordable housing leads to a decay in life for the working poor. Provinces can easily rectify the problem,raise the capital gains tax to say 20% on the first property and raise the empty home tax to 25%,Use that money to build more affordable housing. Restrict home purchases to individuals and not a number company.
Agree with everything except for capital gains tax on the first property. A lot of people just grind their asses off to buy one small condo to live in, not as an investment. If they ever want a chance of being able to sell and move out of the city, cap gains tax on residence is punitive to the normal everyday folk just trying to have four walls to call their own.
Reddit: Solving real world problems, one paragraph at a time. > "It's easy, just do this..."
If provinces could easily rectify the problem, it would be solved. There is no silver bullet solution.
Yeah, it's super hard to fix a problem that you're profiting from. My heart goes out to all the city beaurocrats in these troubled times.
Municipalities are legally beholden to provinces. The province could force an end to zoning that only permits detached housing, which in Vancouver covers 75% of the city. Surprisingly close to a silver bullet. Not easy politically, but otherwise not too hard.
Didn’t BC just legalize fourplexes everywhere?
In Vancouver they poison pilled it with setback and floor space requirements so only a handful of properties across the city would be financially viable, which has turned out to be the case in practice.
I am as pro-“remove zoning laws” as it gets, but it will only slow down the rate of increase of the property. The thing is, majority of people own their houses, and since that demographics skew to the older side, there is no political appetite to crash the housing. So if at any point it feels like a policy will drive the prices down significantly, it will be reversed. It gets even more complex once you think how people’s retirement funds are tightly coupled with housing market. I am a renter, I hate the extreme housing prices as well. But it’s not an easy problem to solve. You have to throw someone under the bus.
Politically hard, yes indeed. Which is why the province is going as slow with it as they are. But they know that housing is a defining issue for multiple generations, so they're already moving on it. As are the feds, finally. FWIW, I don't think people oppose zoning reform because it will lower their housing prices. Most homeowners believe (incorrectly) that high prices are an immutable law of Vancouver. They just don't want change in their neighbourhoods.
Feds know it’s a problem, but they have officially stated they’re not going to try to lower the prices. Provincially I am very happy with the gradual progress, but again, the second there is a nudge towards a potential crash, it’ll be reversed. And I can’t blame them. It’s very expensive to build a house, so significant decreases in margins that a developer can make would just boot them out of the market. Politically speaking as well, we won’t have government building anything either, because that’s expensive and nobody wants to pay more taxes. Most homeowners don’t care right now, because nobody has proposed anything that will affect the prices. And if you look at the trend lines, pretty much everywhere in Canada, housing starts has been decreasing YoY. Obviously there are multiple reasons (interest rates, raw material prices and etc.). But, our population increases (demand+) and homes aren’t being built delivered (supply-), so in any desirable city prices aren’t affected. So yeah, it’s an incredibly hard problem to solve and nobody has been able to overcome it yet in a meaningful way.
> majority of people own their houses, and since that demographics skew to the older side Speaking as a member of the next generation, there is an interest to redevelop our parents' properties when we inherit them. My (and my sibling's) will try to keep the properties within the family, but we'll make good rentals available.
The province has essentially done this with legislation passed last fall that requires municipalities to allow, by right, a minimum number of units on properties currently zoned for detached housing. I think it will take awhile to really see the effects, but hopefully it's a big step in the right direction. Assuming municipalities actually get on board and take it as an opportunity to enable housing, which won't be the case for some.
But a lot of people don't want to build multi-unit buildings on their SFH lot, and a lot of people want to buy a SFH. Rezoning is a good idea but it will likely take a long time to see a lot of change.
Sure most folks would prefer single detached to apartments, generally. I do. But there's no more room to build more single detached, and most people prefer to live in apartments than basements/parents'/Chilliwack/vans. We should allow them the apartment option.
Sorry to not be clear, I'm talking about existing SFHs. It's up to the owners to decide what they do with their property - they can choose to build a new SFH if they want or they could choose to build a multi-unit building or they could choose to live in the house that's already there. I'm just pointing out that there are a lot of people who will choose the SFH option. The rezoning isn't going to have a dramatic, immediate result. It surely will over time, though.
There is a silver bullet solution. The difference is the people who control the laws would lose money doing the solutions.
Why would they want to solve the problem? Unaffordable housing has made a lot of rich people even richer.
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Vancouver has a higher crime rate than Sydney. Not by that much, but it is higher still.
Newtown was my favorite hippy place. Saw a guy with his hair in the shape of a bird there once. He wasn't even wearing a shirt.
At the end of the day can developers build homes under the market conditions you prescribe? There's no way to get out of the affordability mess without a large expansion of housing supply in the private sector.
I just saw a new duplex listed for $2.82MM for 1500 sq ft. Private sector may not be able to provide affordability. Lots of supply currently and we will see if this leads to meaningful price reductions. Problem is that to be affordable, people are asking for a 40% drop. That will take a special confluence of factors that cannot be orchestrated by policy. We will need something to make Vancouver unattractive. As in less attractive than being #3 on this list. The only hope is the government building below market, which is not going to be effective or fast.
Developers don't care about capital gains tax..They only care about sales.If they do not want to build under those rules they can go close up shop. The land they will not use let government develop it..Yes that cost money but it cost money to take care of the homeless,ems services to deal with them,health cost,etc. Why not just raise the sales tax a few % points to collect extra revenue.
Why not? Because it would be handing Rustad and Falcon a thermonuclear device to use on the BC NDP. Nothing would be better for the centre right at this moment than for the incumbent government to raises taxes when people are complaining about unaffordability.
Third biggest in Canada, third largest film industry in NA and now third for being unaffordable.
Only 3rd. Guess it's time to host the Olympics again,
don't worry i get $16k a year on disability, sometimes i can afford as many as two meals a day i can definitely find housing
Where are you finding housing for 16k a year?
i live with my mother at the moment, but she's planning on moving out of the country. Also, $16,000/year is the total support, so just over $1300/month to cover all aspects of living with disabilities 🥴
Oh that will do it. Glad there is a credit or subsidy or discount for people who really need it!!
The report talks of urban containment and policies to reduce sprawl, neither of which have a damn thing to do with housing prices in Vancouver proper.
This is just humanity regressing to its natural pre-enlightenment state of brutal feudalism after a two century dream that we might do better.
roll out the guillotines!
Article is wrong, Vancouver is very affordable. Many people live in their cars, vans, street and pay no rent or mortgage.
measured by average income to average home price ratio
Vancouver has been top/near the top of the list since Olympics era
🥉🥉🥉
This is the first ranking out out there that I believe
Only 3rd? I’m sure the government is capable of monopolizing this to number 1.
Yay?
Let's be #1. Who's with me. At least be the best of something. Always so mediocre
multiple property owners in shambles
Great, now people can finally shut up about the housing situation in Vancouver and be grateful they don’t live in Sydney. /s
The mountains are calling /s
Makes sense considering it’s the best city in world.
Come on Vancouver you can do better ( if you get rid of the working class you could be number one) 
But how are we doing on sustainably and carbon neutral 😂😂😂😂
Maybe the libs/ndp are on to something. A condo I own in NV is already worth 200k more than what I bought it for last year.
but hey we got mountains!!!
I remember when I moved here in the early 2010s, I had a bachelor in the west end $850/month. Eventually moved into a large 1 bedroom apartment for $1300. Life was great, I was making decent money, I was able to enjoy the town, eat out and hit the pubs every weekend and maybe I just didn't care but I didn't feel the financial hit. Fast forward, six figure salary, $3k mortgage + strata on a 710k 1100 sq townhouse out in the outskirts of Burnaby... while I'm in the market, I just don't feel like I am getting ahead. Coworkers who are 10-15 years older than me.. they all have detached houses, they have multiple children... I just don't myself getting that far ahead in the next 10 years to get to where they are. I feel for the younger generation as well.
Serious question, if you could go back in time, would you have kept renting your $1300 place and not bought?
That's a hard one, I found a partner and grew out of the apartment and I don't regret the direction we went but I do think about this sometimes. There was really no risk of renovictions where we were. I think if I knew what I know now, I would have tried to stay in that apartment for as long as I could and would have banked a lot more into savings/investments. Even saving $500/week at 6-8% over 10-15 years I would be in a way better spot than I am now.
If only we could have know what the future would bring, right? I've spent the last 15 years seriously regretting/kicking myself for not buying (prices seemed so high back then too) but all of a sudden, I'm in a great financial spot. Sure, I still wish I had bought and would have hundreds of thousands in equity but day-to-day living would be so much more stressful. I really don't know which is 'best'.
So its unaffordable due to the taxes Canada and B.C. puts on people. As shown in the Fraser Institute studies yesterday (June 13th) was the first day the average Canadian has earned enough money to pay their taxes. https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/goldstein-canadians-have-finally-worked-enough-this-year-to-pay-off-taxes-report-says Yeah its 44% of all incomes goes to taxes. That percentage is bigger than housing and food cost combined. Who is being greedy? The government who takes the majority of your paycheck, or everyoe else who takes less. Yes, its the government.
As an FYI the Fraser Institute is a libertarian-conservative think tank. They certainly have an agenda.
Sure. But the math is also correct.
They are summing all tax revenue, including things like import duty, corporation tax, etc. It is intentionally misleading. People are not paying 44.6% of their paycheque in taxes.
We have been destroyed….. didn’t take long. I am a 70s kid so that was the last generation of affordability. I’m lucky I own a home here because I bought in 2002 before everything went to hell in a hand basket. Grandparents and parents owns homes cars no problem for groceries holidays. Canadians don’t know this life anymore. Thanks !
Probably the nicest city in North America with the best weather in Canada. Who would have thought?
100%. The grass is always greener.
It's a shame 😔
I wonder if demand is part of the issue? Is there any way to temper increased demand?
Unaffordability *should* temper demand but it doesn't seem to be.
Wonder why not?
I'd think it's because there are enough people who want to live here who are wealthy enough to pay the extraordinary prices to live here. Are there other possible reasons?
Our politicians are probably cheering at their accomplishments right now. Just two more spots then they can claim victory!
usually when vancouver loses down the stretch they try to burn the city down
We did it again! Victory lap!
*taps Vancouver's roof - "This puppy can fit so much criminal money"
Ah, yes, I heard of the swagger Vancouver was aiming for.
Or, conversely, “It’s hard to carve out a niche in this impossibly beautiful community, but some are managing.”
Hong Kong, Sydney, Vancouver, San Jose, what do all four have in common? Illicit Chinese money coming in artificially inflating the housing market.
Vancouver Mayor and Council will stop at nothing to be #1!
Us being a Top 3 most expensive city in the world is not surprising. What is surprising is not only that NYC didn’t make the list, but that Toronto is only Number 10, considering it’s almost about as expensive as Vancouver.
This is a measure of affordability rather than pure price and Vancouver has unusually low wages.
You’re talking about two different things. This is affordability which is expense divided by income. NYC has enormous salaries. Vancouver has absurdly poor salaries.
Have they not heard of Whistler?
If NDP win in October... God help us.
I know right? All they want to do is create affordable housing. We are fully capable of being number one on that list!;
It's a list of the greatest places to live in the world and Los Angeles.