Halifax’s cost of living has been ranked as “extreme” in an index ranking cities’ typical monthly income, rent prices, and costs of essential food. The Urban Stress Index (USI) uses data on the distribution of employment income across Canada and the National Rent Report from rentals.ca to divvy out its scores. The index ranks Halifax at 76.35 – the highest among the Canadian cities on its table – beating Toronto at 73.12 and Vancouver at 73.45. The USI calls Halifax, “one of the clearest examples of an urban system that has become structurally overextended.” The index points to housing as a primary shock for residents, with a one-bedroom rental unit in Halifax costing roughly $2,029. It says rent absorbs around 57.8 per cent of a typical monthly income, which is $3,509. Essential food costs take up an additional 18.5 per cent according to the index, costing an average of $650 per month. That leaves Haligonians with roughly 23.6 per cent, or $830, left of their monthly income for daily expenses and savings. “Halifax is therefore not just ‘expensive for Atlantic Canada.’ It has become an affordability outlier in national terms because the city’s income base is too small to absorb a housing market that has repriced so aggressively,” reads the USI website. “Food then compounds that stress instead of softening it.” Neil Lovitt, vice president of planning and economic intelligence at Turner Drake & Partners Ltd., disagrees with the data presented by USI. He says the website uses monthly incomes specific to the eight other Canadian cities listed, but for Halifax it uses provincial income data. “There has been an increase in these pressures, these cost of living challenges, but that has been the case pretty consistently across the country,” he says. While Lovitt disagrees with the USI, he still says it’s important to have these kinds of conversations around affordability in different areas. “Being able to understand what’s happening in different communities across the country and who’s faring better and who’s doing worse and why that may be the case is a very useful thing,” he says. “There’s a lot of hole that you could shoot through this data, for sure,” agrees April Stroink, founder of the Money Fix Institute. “But the whole point of it is that the bulk of income is going towards rent and that the incomes are just not keeping pace.” Stroink’s daughter recently graduated from StFX University in Antigonish, N.S., and is also starting a career in finance. She says her daughter is starting off in circumstances similar to when she began her career in 1999, but the pay has only gone up $5,000 since then. “She was hunting for her first apartment, and it took around $2,000 for one-bedroom,” Stroink adds. “It sickens me, actually, because I think as a young person starting out, she has big goals and big dreams and basically all of her income is going to be going towards rent and basic food.” She says she fears for the younger generation through these cost of living pressures. “I just think all the joy has been sucked out for young people because you can’t just pick a spontaneous trip with your friends to a concert, or the things that I was able to do, because all of your income now is going towards your basics,” says Stroink. “For people who are feeling the squeeze and maybe feeling like they’re bad with their money… this is not a budgeting failure it’s a math failure,” she says. “When the bulk of your income is going to rent and essential food, you can’t budget your way out of this.” For more Nova Scotia news, visit our dedicated provincial page
