Affordability measures the cost of housing compared the annual income that inhabitants earn. This is a better indication of whether or not housing is affordable as opposed to solely looking at housing cost because it looks at how accessible housing is given that people are making a certain amount of income. If one were to look at housing costs alone, they would be neglecting the other factors that affect people’s purchasing power. For example, if housing were on average $2 million in Vancouver but $5 million in London. Taking into account only the housing cost would mean that Vancouver is far more affordable than London. But if one were to look at the additional factor of income, London might have a median income of $150,000 per year while Vancouver inhabitants only have a median income of $50,000 per year. This would mean that with the income that the population is getting, it would be more affordable to live in London than Vancouver. (Please note that all these numbers are inaccurate)
The housing affordability rating categories are: Affordable, Moderately Unaffordable, Seriously Unaffordable, and Severely Unaffordable. They were created by the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. They take census data and use the Median Multiple (median house price divided by gross annual median household income) to determine housing affordability. I think the point of this is to show that housing is no longer affordable for middle income, working class people. As such, this data may be skewed to prove a point. When using manual breaks, one can determine the amount of housing that falls in each category because they are arbitrarily set breaks that suit the purpose of the cartographer.
Housing affordability might not be a good indicator of a cities livability because there are many other factors that could come to play. For instance, food costs might also come into play. Some areas that might have low housing costs and high incomes, such as mining towns in northern BC, have high wages and low housing because there are a surplus of available housing. But the cost of importing food there means that the population of those areas pay a lot more for their food than the population of Metro Vancouver.
Recap of learning: From open source census data, I was able to normalize the data and create a map showing the inequities of housing affordability in two cities.