I see that the writer named "Rich Mole" is at it again on this board...

... trying to pretend the reason houses cost dozens of times the average annual local income in places like Vancouver and Richmond and Sidney and Aukland is not because of rich buyers from Hong Kong and China...

... no, he insists, it is because those places score well on quality of life surveys.

Wow.

Look, Rich Mole, this is not rocket science. In those cities, there is no way, no mechanism, by which house prices can reach dozens of times the average annual local income EXCEPT through a massive incoming flood of external-source money. It is an economic impossibility without an external money source flooding in. 

Local banks do not look at the local worker and say "Oh, hey, you make 60,000 a year, great, here's a mortgage on a 2.5 million dollar house".

And by the way, a good clue that the money has come from Hong Kong and China is to look at the kids on the schoolyards of Richmond and nearby Vancouver...