VANCOUVER—Vancouver has the biggest gap between median home prices and incomes in North America, new data shows.

Andy Yan, an urban planner who is the director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, crunched the numbers for a host of North American cities using numbers from the Canadian and American 2016 censuses.

Despite having one of the strongest economies in Canada, the gap between Vancouver home prices and incomes still increased sharply between 2011 and 2016.

In 2011, housing prices were 9.4 times higher than incomes. By 2016, the gap had widened: housing prices are now 11 times higher than median household incomes.

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Among the 25 cities with the highest home prices, Vancouver falls in third place, behind San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Monica (i.e., Silicon Valley) and San Francisco.

When it comes to incomes, Silicon Valley and San Francisco top the list. But Vancouver ranks a distant 50th place. While Vancouver’s gap between incomes and housing prices is ranked at 11, the next highest city – Los Angeles – has housing prices 8.8 times higher than median incomes.

Seattle, a city Vancouver often compares itself to, has the 14th highest home prices and 10th highest incomes.

Vancouver’s problems with low incomes and high housing prices aren’t anything new, but Yan believes these numbers highlight the magnitude of the problem for a city concerned about retaining talent and a viable labour pool for service jobs.

“It really highlights how Vancouver is an outlier, and has consistently been an outlier in this relationship between housing values and median household values,” Yan said.

B.C.’s scorching economic growth has been led by the Metro Vancouver region. This year in B.C., average hourly wages rose 6.6 per cent, said Bryan Yu, and economist with Central 1 Credit Union.

On the housing front, new measures from the federal and provincial government have cooled the housing market somewhat since January.

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But with a dramatic price spike that took place in the single detached market between 2015 and 2016, and then a run-up in prices in the more affordable condo market starting in the fall of 2016, home prices continue to remain out of reach for local income earners, Yu said. Central 1 tends to consider the median home price to be around $650,000 — in contrast to Yan’s $800,000 — because single family detached homes, the most expensive form of housing, now represent such a small share of sales.

Yan believes his data shows how Vancouver real estate has become a “pool of wealth” — and how important “sustainable, robust and inclusive” economic development will be for the city and Metro Vancouver region.

“There are limitations to this kind of methodology, but it gives you a sense of the scale of challenges to the region,” Yan said.

“When we talk about this, it’s how we’re going to need a leadership that is going to be both heart and brains: Housing as an affair of the heart, and employment to maintain our own capacity to keep our own talent here, our brains.”

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