Edmonton named the most affordable big city in Canada
Edmonton seems to be the place to be if you are hoping to save some coin in Canada, being crowned the most affordable big city in the country.
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy (FCPP), a Canadian think tank, released its 2024 Demographia International Housing Affordability Report on June 3.
Authored by FCPP senior fellow Wendell Cox, the report assesses housing affordability in eight countries across 94 major markets — Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK, and the US — and covers the third quarter of 2023.
Cox used a median price-to-income ratio (median multiple) to determine affordability and rated housing markets from “affordable” to “impossibly unaffordable” based on this median multiple.
Any market with a median multiple over 9.0 was considered “impossibly unaffordable.”
The most affordable Canadian market is Edmonton, with a moderately unaffordable median multiple of 3.6.
Our friends to the south in Calgary landed a little bit lower with a median multiple of 4.6, which was labelled as seriously unaffordable.
Reserve Bank of Australia and Demographia (FCPP)
Two major Canadian cities landed in the top 10 for the most unaffordable, with Toronto’s score of 9.3 falling into the “impossibly unaffordable” category, while Vancouver’s was a whopping 12.3.
Both Montreal (5.8) and Ottawa-Gatineau (5.3) were in the severely unaffordable category in the report.
If you were curious about how cities in the United States shook out, the most affordable market was Pittsburgh, which also landed as the most affordable internationally, followed by Rochester and St. Louis. San Jose was the least affordable major US housing market in 2023, followed by Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and Honolulu.
Do you agree with Edmonton’s level of affordability? Let us know in the comments below.
With files from Imaan Sheikh