Housing Affordability in Canada: Vancouver Contrasted with Ottawa

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What is Housing Affordability?

Housing affordability compares household income and housing prices. This is done by normalizing the median household income of a census tract with its respective median house price, providing a ratio. This metric is a much better way to examine affordability as it takes both income and housing prices into account instead of just housing prices.

What are the Housing Affordability Categories?

The housing affordability categories for this analysis were taken from the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and can be seen in the table below. The Median Multiple refers to the median house cost divided by the median household income for each census tract. Therefore, an affordable area is defined as an area where the median house price is 3 times or less than the median household income.

Affordability-Categories

Is Affordability a Good Measure of a City’s Livability?

I believe that affordability is a good indicator of a city’s ‘livability’ but it is only a single factor amongst many that ought to be taken into account. Affordability of shelter is not the only thing that draws people to an area. Many other factors will draw people to a city such as: weather, transit, nightlife, the job market, recreation possibilities, and cleanliness. While Vancouver is clearly becoming a very unaffordable place to buy property, it scores very highly on these other metrics, continuing to draw people to the city.

Accomplishment Statement

Retrieved spatial and tabular data, normalised for comparison, and created visuals for the datasets using different classification methods.

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