FIGURING
- Nov 18, 2025
- 3 min read
Writing about income had me thinking about housing. I’m really not sure why anyone talks about anything else. Curiously, even when I find the matter being discussed, what's presented is seldom anything more than current rental rates or home prices and sales volumes. Pretty rare is something offering any context of any kind.
As far as I can tell, adjusted for inflation, a median single family home in Victoria, BC in 1980 was around $400,000. Two decades later the median was roughly $550,000. But the real jump came over the following 20 years when, by 2020, the price tag for a median priced home was closer to $1,150,000. That number is interesting but to mean much you have to pair prices with incomes.
So, while median house price went up around 185% between 1980 and 2020, at the same time inflation-adjusted after-tax median household income actually dropped. In 2020 dollars, the median for British Columbia went from around $85,000 in 1980 down to $79,500. And, obviously, rental rates moved in a similar way: wildly discordant with wages. To compare with even earlier generations, in the twenty years between 1940 and 1960, for example, household incomes nearly doubled, from $27,000 to $52,500. Folks have noticed this jump previously and tend to claim that this was largely due to vast numbers of women entering the workforce for the first time. That sounds about right but I cannot find evidence of this using Statistics Canada data. It looks to me like female workplace participation hardly moved: from about 28% in 1940 to roughly 30% in 1960. Regardless, with the jump in household earnings, median house price went from something like $75,000 to $160,000 in 2025 dollars over that period — or from nearly three years earnings to about the same.
Since then, earnings have not doubled again. In the 60 years to 2020, after-tax median household income, in fact, remains a whopping $25,000 shy of doubling — coming in at, as above, only $79,500. This, while median house price today is nowhere near the historical 3 to 4X median income but closer to 12 to 16X. Relatedly, people also tend to believe that minimum wage has gone up a lot over the last sixty years. Actually, it hasn’t moved. What was minimum wage (in inflation-adjusted terms) in British Columbia back in 1960? $17.00. In 2020 it was up not even 50 cents.
However, that’s not anything like the full picture. In 1960, for example, there was no provincial income tax and the federal tax rates for median and lower incomes were far less than today while there were more exemptions for taxpayers. At present, too, costs of all kinds are also higher while there are simply more living expenses (if a person wishes to participate in civilization.) We all know this. A new car, for example, in 1960 had a median cost around $27,000, inflation-adjusted. Today the median price is $64,000. Or, I like to note how most folks rented their one household telephone (worth around $20) from the phone company 40 or 50 years ago and that monthly phone rental plus usage typically came to around $30 (in 2025 dollars). And I like to contrast this with what we all know: that phones today commonly cost between $200-$1,200 per person and with a monthly rate of between $20-$100 per phone. Meaning that a family of five used to spend $3,600 over a decade for telecommunications while the same family could easily spend that in a year. Those cars and phones are, of course, just the change in price or fees for a product or service and not entirely novel innovations such as the internet landing in most people’s homes (at $50 or $200 per month)...
The world is far more different than the addition of some screens in people's hands suggests.
SOME DEETS:
Stats Can - 1981 Census
Census Mapper - Median Income Explorer
CMHC - Real Median Household Income (after-tax) 2006-2023
Stats Can - 2020 after-tax incomes by province
Stats Can - Consumer Price Index
