I wrote in July about the city of Vancouver supplanting Calgary as the city with the highest net worth. The average net worth per household was $575,826 in July, a sharp contrast from the other side of the country in Newfoundland where it’s a mere $140,706.

Now Vancouver has another distinction to go along with being the city with the most well-heeled residents, and it fits in nicely with our homelessness problem. The Demographia International report, released Monday, looked at 272 metropolitan markets in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, and found Vancouver housing the most expensive of them all.

The main culprit, according to the report, is land-use policies which, although “green”, limit urban sprawl, and therefore reduce the areas where the burgeoning population can live. It also classified Toronto and Montreal as being “severely unaffordable”, and “seriously unaffordable”, respectively.

The reason Vancouver gets top marks for unaffordability is that median housing sales seriously outstrip median household incomes. For instance, when the information was gathered last year, the median sale value of a home was $540,900, while the median household income was $58,200. That creates a “Median Multiple” of 9.3.

Perhaps surprisingly, the most affordable major market in Canada listed was Ottawa. But in 2007, canadianbusiness.com ranked Ottawa as being the “best city” in Canada in which to live. It measured a number of factors in its assessment, such as transportation, commuting, weather, unemployment, and standard of living.

The Demographia International report authors, Wendell Cox and Hugh Pavletich, based their findings on 2009 third-quarter data, and said that to be affordable, housing prices have to be equivalent to approximately three years’ income. So while Vancouver ranks a 9.3 on the index, the Median Multiple of Canadian cities was 3.7 in 2009.

Some critics say that the unaffordability index doesn’t take into account other factors that make Vancouver more “livable” than other cities. For instance, Vancouver scored in the top 10 in the Mercer international “Quality of Living” survey for 2009. It finished fourth for overall livability, behind Vienna in Austria, and Zurich and Geneva, both in Switzerland. It also finished first in North America for infrastructure. Vancouver has fared equally well in other sorts of surveys, finishing first in the Economist’s prestigious ranking.

There is some good news in the Demographia International report. Thunder Bay was listed as “affordable” in the report.