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Median home values in Vancouver are known to be the highest in Canada, but it’s a whole other stratosphere to see them come in third in North America, up there with the economic powerhouses of Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

And then, it’s a dramatic shift of the eye to see that median household incomes in Vancouver are near the bottom of a list of 51 North American metropolitan areas, sandwiched between two much sleepier places: Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Columbus, Ohio,

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Vancouver was number 50.

“Columbus has a hockey team so I knew where that was, but I had to look up Lancaster,” said Andy Yan, director ofSimon Fraser University’s City Program.

This is Yan’s latest offer of perspective on the gap between what Metro Vancouver residents earn and what home values are.

It comes as regulators and major banks are assessing the risks of their exposure to Vancouver housing, while general debt levels in the country remain at what Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz recently described as “worrying levels,” even though tighter lending regulations have helped to steady prices.