Hacker News Reader

I have lived in both. It's easier to afford a Canadian home, despite their price, especially in Montreal but even in Toronto, compared to NYC or SF, for the median person. The median household income in NYC is ~80k, vs ~95k in Toronto.

View on HN

Canada is much much more geographicly concentrated than the US.

Toronto is definitely cheaper than NYC. However Toronto represents a WAYYYY higher percentage of Canadians than NY does.

Rough numbers.

GTA population ~7 million

NYC population ~8.5 million

By representation GTA represents 10x the amount of the country that NYC does.

Major cities being unaffordable in Canada pretty much means Canada is unaffordable.

The same case is not true in the US

If you're going to use the GTA @ 7M (6.2 according to wikipedia[0]) you should perhaps use Metro NYC @ 23.5M[1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City

That's a fair correction, but it is still approx 3x the proportion of the population.

Edit: actually I take that back the metropolitan NY area seems to encompass a much larger area than the GTA and goes across multiple states.

Sure, but on the other hand that's just as true for income in the US, the disparity in average income between major cities and the rest of the US is even sharper than it is in Canada.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com