All good things must come to an end, they say, and so it was this week that Vancouver learned it’s no longer the most livable city in the world after owning the bragging rights for almost a decade.
Perhaps just as bad for the city, however, was the credibility beating suffered by The Economist, the British magazine that compiles the list each year. Now that we’ve seen how the magazine’s so-called Intelligence Unit arrives at its decisions, it brings into question the integrity of the process and the ultimate value of the distinction that Vancouver has smugly crowed about all these years.
Red-faced editors in London were answering questions all day Tuesday about the reason given for bumping Vancouver to No. 3 on the magazine’s index, behind Melbourne and Vienna – that reason being “a small adjustment in Vancouver’s score for transport infrastructure” because of intermittent closures on the Malahat Highway.
The Malahat is on Vancouver Island – nowhere near Vancouver. It would be like downgrading Toronto’s livability score because of traffic problems in Ottawa. The magazine tried to defend its decision by saying it looks at “regional” transportation issues in assessing a city’s infrastructure score. (That sound was someone from The Economist trying to make lemonade out of lemons.)
I must say I’ve never quite understood the magazine’s rankings, which it says are intended to quantify “the challenges that might be presented to an individual’s lifestyle in any given location.” Yet, the survey doesn’t look at housing costs.
The five categories it considers are stability (crime, civil unrest); health care (availability, quality); culture and environment (climate, level of corruption, cultural availability); education (availability and quality); and infrastructure (quality of transport, energy and water). Under infrastructure, the Intelligence Unit also looks at availability of quality housing, but not cost.
But, in many cities, those costs are the single biggest threat to the quality of a person’s lifestyle. Yet, inevitably, the cities that perennially sit at or near the top of The Economist’s most livable rankings have the highest housing costs in the world.
The 2011 Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, for instance, ranks Vancouver as the third most expensive city in the world when it comes to housing. Ironically, it placed first last year but, this year, has fallen behind Hong Kong and Sydney. But right behind Vancouver on the world’s most expensive housing list is Melbourne – the new “most livable city in the world.”
Australia, as it turns out, now has the most unaffordable housing in the English-speaking world. And yet four out of the top 10 cities in The Economist’s livability survey for 2011 are in Australia.
The Demographia survey uses the same method for evaluating urban markets as the World Bank, the United Nations and Harvard University’s Joint Centre on Housing. And it rates as “severely unaffordable” those markets where the median house price is greater than 5.1 times the median household income.
In Vancouver’s case, the median house price is 9.5 times greater than median household income. The factor is 9.6 in Sydney and 9.0 in Melbourne. In Adelaide, the so-called ninth most livable city in the world, it’s 7.1. Hong Kong, meantime, has a median house price 11.4 times greater than the median household income.
A Vancouver household purchasing the median-priced house could pay at least an additional $750,000 in mortgage payments than the historic housing affordability norm, according to Demographia. The additional cost would be more than $250,000 for a household in Toronto, the world’s purported fourth most livable city.
That’s money that people in Vancouver, Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne and elsewhere are pouring into obscene mortgages and, consequently, don’t have for buying other goods and services. The result is the diminishment of job creation and growth in commercial sectors such as retail.
Vancouver is a wonderful city, don’t get me wrong. So are Sydney, Melbourne and Toronto. But if you can’t afford to live in them, it doesn’t make them livable in my books.
