The average monthly mortgage in Toronto is now more than 110 per cent of the average family income

A new study has found that Torontonians making the median family income would need to devote an impossible 110.2 per cent of it to monthly mortgage payments, after taxes, to afford the average mortgage here. That’s up from 56 per cent in 2014, according to the Fraser Institute, the conservative think tank that published the report.

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It notes that housing affordability is closely linked to income, which has largely stagnated in Toronto over the past 10 years while real estate prices have skyrocketed. “As wages have flatlined, the housing unaffordability crisis has worsened,” said co-author Steven Globerman in a statement. “To make housing more affordable for Ontario families, policymakers should focus on increasing wages and incomes as part of the overall solution.”

Toronto was the most expensive of the province’s 14 largest urban centres. Oshawa took second place, with the average mortgage at 92.2 per cent of the median family income after taxes, while Ottawa-Gatineau was the least expensive area, sitting at 50.4 per cent. In none of the province’s major urban centres was the average mortgage even close to the affordability threshold of one-third of the average family’s income.

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“There is a perception that housing outside of the GTA is still somewhat affordable, but that’s not true,” says the Fraser Institute’s Austin Thompson. “Even in cities like Windsor and Kingston, buying a typical home would require a family earning the local median income to spend more than half of its after-tax earnings on mortgage payments.”

The study also found that, across all of the cities examined, it would take an average of 22 months to save for a 20 per cent down payment on a home, up from 14.1 months in 2014.