Must-read: Dusting Demographia and the most-unaffordable-city myth

Jim Sutherland, in Vancouver Magazine, uncovers the origins of the distorted meme generated by a right-wing pundit …
If (you’ve) heard once, (you’ve) heard a hundred times that it takes about 10 years of average household income to buy an average home, and that this renders us the second least affordable city in the entire world, or at least the English-speaking world. The primary force lurking behind the affordability story is an annual survey by a “think tank” called Demographia that upon further investigation proves to be an arm of the Belleville, Illinois-based Wendell Cox Consultancy; Cox, it turns out, is a right-wing pundit and transportation consultant whose stated mission is to fight ideas and initiatives that attempt to moderate automobile use.
There are a couple of problems with the Demographia analysis. One is the contention that too much planning and too few freeways created the conditions for homes in Vancouver to cost more than in a Flint, Michigan, or Thunder Bay, Ontario. The other is the selective nature of the survey, which does not examine the world at all but a mere seven countries. No Africa, no South America, no continental Europe, almost no Asia-it’s the Sarah Palin view of the world. (Well, except that there’s no Russia.) And yet, despite restricting the survey to roughly seven percent of the world’s population, Cox has somehow convinced pretty much everyone that the vast majority of global cities are a lot cheaper than Vancouver.
In fact there are more thorough analyses out there. One, by the Serbia-based crowd-sourced website Numbeo.com, comes up with house-to-income ratios very similar to Demographia’s but analyzes 362 of the world’s largest cities in more than 100 countries. On Numbeo, Vancouver sits not second or even 25th, but as the 125th least affordable city in the world.
Our price-to-income ratio is about one-third that of Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen and comparable to or cheaper than most other places where Chinese emigrants might reasonably expect to land. Potboiler settings like Moscow, London, Paris, and Tokyo are up to twice as expensive, while secondary but still global cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Barcelona-the kind that join us on livability surveys-are tightly bunched around us in terms of affordability as well.
Comparable American spots like Seattle, San Francisco, and San Diego are a little to a lot more affordable, but prices in the U.S. recently experienced a catastrophic plunge and are now bouncing back strongly, even as ours soften. It’s clear that our perception of affordability has been coloured by living on a continent where housing is unusually inexpensive.
Full story here.