Where did BC get expensive?

Each bar is one of BC's 115 municipalities — the rural areas are held back for now, for a reason explained below. The vertical line marks 26.8%, what BC's consumer price index did over the same period. Anything left of that line got cheaper in real terms, and 9 of 115 did.

The names at the top are not the ones the housing conversation usually features. Ucluelet, Elkford, Pemberton, Clearwater, Revelstoke, Logan Lake, Fernie, Rossland — mountain and coastal towns, most of them small, most of them places people move to rather than places people commute from. Ucluelet's typical sale went from $233,449 to $693,747.

Click a region in the key below to see just its communities — the scatter further down and the table at the foot of the page follow along.

Group the same communities by the province's own development regions and the gap is stark. The Kootenays led at +103%. Mainland/Southwest — Vancouver, Surrey, Burnaby, Richmond and their neighbours — managed +58%, well below the provincial median of +83%. The City of Vancouver rose +37%; West Vancouver rose +2%, a real-terms loss of 20% once inflation is taken out.

Click any bar below to filter the rest of the page to that region. Click it again, or press Escape, to go back to all of BC.

That is not because the Lower Mainland got cheap. It is still far and away the most expensive place to buy, at a median $843,022 against $482,584 in the Kootenays. It is that the money moved somewhere else.

Only one region did worse, and for an unrelated reason. The Northeast came last at +29% — Fort St. John, Dawson Creek, Chetwynd, Tumbler Ridge. Those are gas-patch towns, and they track the resource cycle rather than the housing one. Fort St. John's typical sale price is up 4% in nine years, which after inflation means it lost 18% of its value.

Sort every community by what it cost in 2017 and split it into quarters. The cheapest quarter rose +98%. The most expensive quarter rose +54%. The gap between BC's cheap towns and its expensive ones narrowed sharply — not because anywhere got more affordable, but because the bargains were used up. A town that cost $186,885 in 2017 is not a bargain any more; it is simply a smaller mortgage.

Price alone is only half the question. Statistics Canada publishes median family income for 25 BC communities, so the two can be put side by side. Between 2017 and 2023 the median family income in these places rose +26% — almost exactly inflation. Prices rose +66%.

A typical home went from 4.0 years of a family's gross income to 5.8. The sharpest moves are on Vancouver Island: Courtenay went from 3.6 to 5.8, and Port Alberni — a mill town that was among the last affordable places on the island — from 3.2 to 5.3.

BC has published the mortgage payment on a median home as a share of median after-tax family income every quarter since 1979. Today it is 46%. In the third quarter of 1981 it was 83%, when the median home cost $106,000 and prime was 21%.

This is the part that gets lost. Prices relative to income are the worst on record, but the monthly payment is not, because interest rates spent the intervening forty years falling. The burden is carried differently now: less in the monthly bill, more in the size of the down payment and the number of years owed.

The province recorded 146,107 market transactions across these communities in 2017 and 101,665 in 2025 — -30%. The peak was 2021. A market can get more expensive and less active at the same time, and this one did.

All 154 communities with enough sales to measure in both years. Population change is from Statistics Canada's annual municipal estimates; it is blank for rural areas and a few First Nations governments that do not map to a census subdivision.