To live in Kitchener’s most expensive neighbourhood, you’ll need to earn more than double the median household income in Canada.

That’s according to a new report from Zoocasa.com released Friday.

The neighbourhood in question is Hidden Valley/Pioneer Tower. So far this year, the median price of a freehold home was $1,115,000.

To afford that kind of house, your required household income would need to be about $158,990, the report says. That’s compared to the median household income in Canada of $70,774.

It’s not all doom and gloom in Kitchener, though—the second-least affordable neighbourhood in Kitchener is the Chicopee/Freeport neighbourhood, where the median house price in 2019 has been $640,000.

Most affordable is Kitchener’s Victoria Hills neighbourhood, where a family making $57,757 can get by affording a median house price of $405,050. That’s $13,017 less than the median income in Kitchener.

In Waterloo, meanwhile, the upper echelons of house affordability are more consistent: six neighbourhoods have median home prices between $860,500 and $628,000.

Those neighbourhoods have the following median prices:

  • Upper Beechwood/Beechwood West: $860,500
  • Beechwood/University: $724,000
  • Colonial Acres/East Bridge: $650,000
  • Columbia Forest/Clair Hills: $649,900
  • Uptown Waterloo/Westmount: $630,000
  • Erbsville/Laurelwood: $628,000

According to the Zoocasa report, the most affordable neighbourhoods in Waterloo are Bridgeport and Uptown Waterloo/North Ward, separated by just $100 in their median prices of $445,100 and $445,000, respectively.

In those neighbourhoods, the median needed household income is around $63,461, or about $19,564 less than Waterloo’s median income.