House affordability report: Kitchener home to richest neighbourhood, greatest disparity between rich and poor

Most and least affordable neighbourhoods in KW From CTV Kitchener’s Max Wark: An online brokerage has ranked KW’s affordability neighbourhood by neighbourhood—where does yours rank?

To live in Kitchener’s most expensive neighbourhood, you’ll need to earn more than double the median household income in Canada.

That’s according to a new report from Zoocasa.com released Friday.

The neighbourhood in question is Hidden Valley/Pioneer Tower. So far this year, the median price of a freehold home was $1,115,000.

To afford that kind of house, your required household income would need to be about $158,990, the report says. That’s compared to the median household income in Canada of $70,774.

It’s not all doom and gloom in Kitchener, though—the second-least affordable neighbourhood in Kitchener is the Chicopee/Freeport neighbourhood, where the median house price in 2019 has been $640,000.

Most affordable is Kitchener’s Victoria Hills neighbourhood, where a family making $57,757 can get by affording a median house price of $405,050. That’s $13,017 less than the median income in Kitchener.

In Waterloo, meanwhile, the upper echelons of house affordability are more consistent: six neighbourhoods have median home prices between $860,500 and $628,000.

Those neighbourhoods have the following median prices:

According to the Zoocasa report, the most affordable neighbourhoods in Waterloo are Bridgeport and Uptown Waterloo/North Ward, separated by just $100 in their median prices of $445,100 and $445,000, respectively.

In those neighbourhoods, the median needed household income is around $63,461, or about $19,564 less than Waterloo’s median income.