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Though no expert on the subject, Hankle, like just about everyone else across the city, is obsessed with the topic and increasingly resigned to never owning a house himself. Standing in Yaletown, a one-time industrial site where nearby two-bedroom apartments can go for $1.8 million, he calls on political parties competing for his vote to build more low-cost housing and introduce programs to guarantee people a livable minimum income.

He also picks up on the theme of the passing woman, saying governments need to begin collecting data on exactly who’s coming into the city and their impact on affordability. “There’s a huge concentration of wealth and it just isn’t sustainable,” he says.

Bubble Unburst

Unlike the U.S., Canada didn’t experience a housing price collapse with the global recession and has defied predictions ever since that the bubble is about to burst. With the exception of declines in 2009, 2012 and 2013, housing prices have risen in each of the past 15 years, with the cost doubling from August 2005 to 2015, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, out-pacing wage gains.

I’m thinking twice about starting a family here

“Our big challenge is affordable housing,” said Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, in a Sept. 25 interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York. “It’s been difficult to deal with more affordable housing for a younger work force in particular.”

The Economist Intelligence Unit has named Vancouver the most expensive city to live in North America and a 2014 study by consultancy Demographia cited it as the second-least affordable housing market in the world after Hong Kong. Rising prices in Vancouver pushed housing affordability to “risky levels” in the second quarter as the costs of owning a bungalow rose to an unprecedented 86.9 per cent of household income, an August report by RBC Capital Markets said.