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Comment by typicalrunt | Hacker News Reader

On the topic of living costs for Vancouver, coincidentally enough WorkSafeBC (Vancouver's version of OSHA) just released a cost of living calculator for the BC region. You can see that housing will eat up the majority of your paycheque for an average wage (maybe not rockstar IT devs) [1].

http://www.costofliving.welcomebc.ca/

[1] Median family income in BC is $69,150 as of 2011. Source: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/f...

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Interesting that the median price for a detached single family home in Vancouver is now $929,700 [1] and in Santa Clara county (which is San Jose and the cities around it) is "only" $754,400 [2], of course a house in San Francisco is like over a million dollars.

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/house-prices-still-rising-in...

[2] http://www.zillow.com/santa-clara-county-ca/home-values/

$929,000 in Vancouver means the east side, which is traditionally the lower priced and income area of Vancouver. If you want anything close to downtown or the West side, it is well over $1.5M.

A lot of detached homes in Vancouver at the $900k price range look like they are in bad condition and reflect the land value. So while it is expensive to purchase at $900k+, consider the renovations that will be needed to bring the house up to a livable condition.

> A lot of detached homes in Vancouver at the $900k price range look like they are in bad condition and reflect the land value.

So much so, that a game has been made about this, Crack Shack or Mansion [0].

[0] http://www.crackshackormansion.com/index.html

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