Name: A Short Story About Why You Cannot Buy A House
Uploaded: 2026-01-16T04:42:06.000Z
Duration: 12 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

For most of the 20th century, a typical house cost about three times a typical household's income.

People could buy a place with three years of pay and that used to be normal, but

A global study looked at 95 major cities and found that not a single one is considered affordable anymore.

Even the so called normal cities have slipped out of reach.

Across these centres, the average home now costs more than five times what a typical household earns.

And in places like Hong Kong, Sydney and Vancouver, that that number isn't five, it's nine, 10, even 14 times income.

In Beijing and Shanghai, price to income ratios routinely exceed 20 or even 30 times, showing just how far the gap can stretch in the world's most pressured markets.

So yes, it's official, the dream of owning a home is dying.

And when that dream disappears, a lot of other things start disappearing with it.

As homes turn into investment opportunities instead of places to live, people put off having kids because they can't afford the space.

They turn down better jobs because moving costs too much.

And younger generations stop saving altogether because what's the point of saving for something that you'll never be able to afford anyway?

The result of this shift is a strange economy where the people who build our cities, teach our kids and keep everything running can't afford to live in the very places they keep alive.

If people can't afford to populate these cities, can prices really get any worse?

And finally, what would it actually take to fix it?

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Every year, Chapman University releases the Demographia International Housing Affordability Report, one of the most detailed looks at living costs anywhere.

It compares house prices to household incomes across 95 cities like Sydney, Toronto, London and San Francisco, and

it shows where the dream of home ownership still exists and where it's completely gone.

Researchers use something called the median multiple, the price of a typical home divided by a typical household's yearly income.

In a healthy market, that number sits around three.

But this year, something unprecedented happened.

For the first time in the report's 21 year history, not a single market was considered affordable.

While conditions vary, Most of the 95 cities now fall into the seriously or severely unaffordable categories, meaning a typical home costs more than four to five times what a typical household earns.

And in 12 of them things have gotten so bad they added a new label impossibly unaffordable, where the median home costs more than nine times the median income.

At the top of this list is Hong Kong at 14.4 times income, and

Then come San Jose, Vancouver and Los Angeles.

And once you start looking beyond those cities, you realise the same pattern repeats across entire countries.

Homes in Australia's average city are now near 10 times median income.

Even smaller markets like Perth or Brisbane are now less affordable than New York.

In Canada, affordability has been collapsing since the mid 2000s.

Vancouver has ranked amongst the fourth least affordable cities on Earth for 18 years straight, and

Greater London homes now sit at nine times median income, while the UK average has crept to 5.6, which is roughly double what it was in the 1990s.

Even the United States, well known for its sprawling suburbs and cheaper housing, has climbed from 3.9 before the pandemic to 4.8 today.

For context, Pittsburgh, the most affordable city on the list, sits at 3.2.

Just 30 years ago, nearly all of these cities were affordable.

Home prices rose roughly in line with incomes, but today they've completely split apart.

The report's authors called this an existential threat to middle income households, and

you don't need to be a researcher to see why.

When home prices rise faster than wages, the effects spread far beyond the housing market, families delay having kids.

Workers turn down better jobs because they can't afford to move.

Younger generations lose access to what used to be the cornerstone of middle class life, owning a home.

Which raises the bigger question, if this wasn't a problem 30 years ago, what changed?

Today, it's part of a global investment strategy.

Over the last few decades, almost everything that counts as an asset has shot up in price.

Not just homes, but land, stocks and even art.

Because rich people, corporations and big funds have more cash than ever and they all want a safe place to park it.

When the wealthy get more money, they don't buy more groceries, they buy assets.

Housing got hit the hardest because it's both essential and one of the easiest assets to own, rent out or borrow against.

This artificially boosted demand, while at the same time we were arbitrarily limiting supply.

It began with good intentions, protecting greenspace, controlling sprawl, preserving neighbourhood character.

But over time, those good intentions turned into zoning limits, height caps, parking minimums, endless approvals, all of which slowed construction and drove up the cost of land that could be developed.

As those restrictions tightened, housing stopped behaving like a normal market.

Prices no longer reflected the cost of bricks and labour, they reflected policy made scarcity.

As interest rates fell and global cash supplies surged, more capital chased the same limited number of homes.

Investors, funds and even pension systems realized that real estate offered steady returns and safety from inflation.

If you could borrow at 3% and your property rose 7% a year, you didn't need to live in it, you just needed to own it.

This shift turned homes into financial products.

Institutional buyers started purchasing single family homes in bulk.

Foreign investors treated a property as a storehouse of wealth.

And even regular households began to see real estate as something that always went up.

That wave of money flowed straight into the cities, already at the top of Demographia's list, where limited supply sent prices through the roof.

In markets like these, the more valuable housing became, the more capital it attracted, creating a feedback loop between scarcity and speculation.

For most of the 20th century, income and house prices moved together.

As workers became more productive, they earned more, and as cities grew, they added more homes.

But in the 1990s, those trajectories diverged.

Trade, automation and offshoring put a lid on middle income wage growth, even as living costs rose.

In the US, median real wages have risen only around 10% in the last 20 years.

While home prices have doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in the same period a few decades ago.

And if a second owner joined the workforce, that meant a bigger house or a better neighbourhood.

But once everyone had two incomes, sellers knew it and prices climbed to keep pace.

Instead of making homes more affordable, dual incomes just made the same homes cost twice as much.

And as prices rose faster than pay, something else happened.