Affordability measuring takes into account the mean income in the city and compares it with the average cost of a house to evaluate whether or not the average person can afford to buy a house. It is a better indicator than just housing cost, because it tells you who is buying these houses. These categories come from StatsCan and therefore are quite reliable, for example if they came from the City of Vancouver and they were telling us Vancouver was very affordable, that would be less trustworthy. Livability of a city is a very subjective term, because Vancouver is repeatedly ranked as one of the most “livable” cities in the world, yet it has the least affordable housing market in Canada. Therefore, affordability does not equate with livability and is not a good indicator.
