Toronto named one of the top 10 'impossibly unaffordable' cities in the world

Struggling to pay for all aspects of life in Toronto has become the norm for residents, but at least our experience is consistently validated by rankings that place the city among the least affordable places in the world.

The most recent one comes from a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit called the Urban Reform Institute, which has sadly deemed Toronto one of the ten most "impossibly affordable" cities around the globe, pointing to how sharply housing affordability has deteriorated in Canada, and in the GTA in particular.

"There has been a considerable loss of housing affordability in Canada since the mid-2000s, especially in the Vancouver and Toronto markets. In contrast, there had been no housing affordability deterioration from 1971 to 2004, more than three decades" the think tank writes.

"Severely unaffordable housing has now spread to smaller, less unaffordable markets in Ontario, such as Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, Brantford, London and Guelph, as residents of metro Toronto seek lower costs of living outside the Toronto market."

With an income-to-home price ratio (or affordability score) of 9.3 — considered "severely unaffordable" — T.O. came in the tenth spot for the toughest places to get by financially given gross median household salaries and median home prices.

We came only after such infamously pricey locales as Hong Kong (with a score of 16.7), Sydney (13.3), Vancouver (12.3) and San Jose (11.9). L.A. (10.9), Honolulu (10.5), Melbourne (9.8), Adelaide and San Diego (both 9.5) rounded out the list. Nearly 100 international metropolitan areas were assessed for the disheartening study.

"Housing markets are metropolitan areas, which are also labor markets. In a well-functioning market, the median priced house should be affordable to a large portion of middle-income households, as was overwhelmingly the case a few decades ago," the institute says.

Of Toronto, it notes that real estate affordability continues to worsen by the equivalent of multiple years of income each year.