Home ownership is out of reach for many middle-class families who dream of buying a house in their neighbourhood, according to an analysis of MLS sales data by the Toronto Star.The analysis shows that in every one of the city’s 140 neighbourhoods, the income needed to purchase a median-priced single-family house — even with a 20 per cent down payment — is tens of thousands of dollars more than what a typical median-income family living there earns.Even in the most affordable area of the city — Mount Dennis, the neighbourhood around Weston Rd. and Eglinton Ave. — a purchaser would need an annual income of more than $100,000 to qualify for a mid-priced home at $616,500. That income is double what a typical family living there earns in a year, according to Statistics Canada income data from 2015, the most recent year available.Condos are more affordable, but a median-priced unit in 100 or more of the city’s neighbourhoods still had a selling price above the purchasing power of a typical family residing there. The data also shows:Forty-six per cent of all single-family houses sold in Toronto in 2018 went for more than a million dollars.That’s slightly less than a mid-priced single-family house in Regent Park, where poverty levels were once the highest in the city. At a median selling price of $1.025 million, a buyer with 20 per cent down would need an income of $171,659 to qualify for a mortgage.In the Bridle Path-Sunnybrook-York Mills neighbourhood, the median price of a single-family home was nearly four times that. A household would need an income of $655,487 a year, and 20 per cent down, to afford its $3.98-million price tag — and mortgage payments of just over $19,000 a month.In two of the city’s hottest-selling neighbourhoods, Stonegate-Queensway, which is in the southwest part of Toronto near the Kingsway, and in the Beach to the east, median prices were $1.12 million and $1.26 million respectively.In at l ...
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