These maps were created to analyze the affordability of housing in the metro areas of Vancouver and Montreal. Affordability metrics were calculated by normalising median house prices for each census tract to the median household income. Measuring affordability in this way rather than simply analysing housing cost is a better indicator of affordability as it also takes into account differences in average income between census tracts. It is clear that the majority of Metro Vancouver now falls into the severely unaffordable category and it is in fact one of the most unaffordable cities in the world at the moment. Montreal differs in that it has an unaffordable downtown core but the suburbs fall more into the affordable and moderately unaffordable categories.

The housing affordability categories for this analysis were taken from the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and can be seen in Table 2. The Median Multiple refers to the median house cost divided by the median household income for each census tract. Therefore a moderately unaffordable area is defined as an area where the median house price is 3-4x the median household income.

I believe affordability is a good indicator of a city’s ‘livability’ but it is only one factor amongst many that should be taken into account. Affordability of shelter is not the only thing that draws people to an area, you also want many other factors that could include: a stable job market, access to nature and recreation, natural beauty, absence of pollution etc. While Vancouver is clearly becoming a very unaffordable place to buy property, it scores very highly on these other metrics and so people will continue to be drawn to the city.