Where in the world can I afford to live??

Demographia has recently published their International Housing Affordabiltiy Survey [now gone], and a brief look at it this morning was interesting enough to set it aside for a deep read in the near future. Although I haven’t seen any Northern information yet, the report is 52 pages, so it may be there (or we may not be particularly affordable or unaffordable in an international context). With the dramatic price increases in Whitehorse in recent years, having a global perspective is important to me.

Of note to me, Kelowna (BC) is the most unaffordable community in Canada and the 13th most unaffordable community in the world, 2 positions above Vancouver (all 4 of the “severely unaffordable” Canadian communities are in British Columbia). New Zealand (with Australia) has the least affordable housing among all of the surveyed nations. The report summarizes: “historic housing affordability has been lost in nearly all markets of Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, while the housing affordability crisis is considerably less severe in Canada and the United States.” The variation in the States, though, is extreme – while the country has the most unaffordable housing among the surveyed nations, it also has some of the most affordable housing. Some of the comments are quite shocking: “In Los Angeles, 29 percent of the median household income was required to pay the median mortgage in 2000. By 2007, that figure had risen to 82 percent.”! Not surprisingly, “the least affordable housing tends to be concentrated in California, the Northeast and Hawaii”.

With the number of people who are globally transient increasing, housing must be an important consideration (along with employment, weather, and the social atmosphere, I expect) in deciding where to live. The purchase of housing as investment property, whether as a timeshare or rental (vacation or residential) is driven largely by those same factors, though weather is undoubtedly the prime driver of timeshare investments.