Can we afford to live in Vancouver?

In terms of overall cost of living, Vancouver is not particularly expensive. Mercer carried out a cost of living survey for overseas workers in 2008 and rated Vancouver number 64 in their list - cheaper than cities such as Toronto, Lisbon, Amsterdam and Madrid.

Housing prices, however, are crazy in Vancouver. Demographia has calculated the affordability of housing by seeing how many median household incomes are necessary to buy a house of median price. They call this number the median multiple. Vancouver has some of the least affordable housing in the world. A house of median price costs 8.4 times the median household annual income.

Expensive:

9.6 Sunshine Coast, Australia
8.4 Vancouver BC, Canada
8.3 Sydney, Australia
8.0 San Francisco, US
7.4 Victoria BC, Canada
7.0 New York, US
6.9 London, England

Affordable:

3.4 Ottawa ON, Canada
3.0 Winnipeg, MB, Canada
2.3 Windsor ON, Canada
2.2 Thunder Bay ON, Canada
2.1 Cape Breton NS, Canada

What to do? Give up on Vancouver to live in cute Cape Breton? It's supposed to be almost as beautiful as British Columbia, but we are not fishermen... It's a small place, which means it must be harder to get a job. The same goes for other smaller cities like Thunder Bay. They are probably a bit rednecky, too. Perhaps we are just worrying too much. Renting is not that bad. Here's an article (second on the page) showing how buying a house can be a bad investment because of what you pay in interest to the bank, and how renting turns out to be cheaper . Also, plots of land beyond central Vancouver (or in Vancouver Island) may still be affordable. And there we can build our earthship...