The difference between Toronto and the oft-cited "global cities" of New York, London, Paris, etc. is that all of those cities have a proportionate number of ext

The difference between Toronto and the oft-cited "global cities" of New York, London, Paris, etc. is that all of those cities have a proportionate number of extremely high-earning or high-wealth individuals to support their astronomical housing costs. Manhattan is expensive, but if you work for Goldman or Google you can still afford it. And you can see that this is true because New York, London and Paris all easily support a huge number of businesses catering to the everyday needs of high-wealth individuals. High-end restaurants, luxury car dealerships, tailors - whatever luxury stuff you can imagine, you will easily find it in London or New York. That is not the case in Toronto. The issue is not that prices are going up, but that they are going up exponentially in a way that doesn't relate at all to the growth of the local economy. Toronto is a city where an expensive restaurant is one that charges more than $40 for an entree. You will not find $100 cocktails or $500 tasting menus a la Hong Kong or New York in Toronto, because there would be nobody to buy them. You can still get a haircut for under $20 and see people in $300 off-the-rack suits in the Financial District, because the people there earn $70,000 or $80,000 not $800,000 or $8,000,000 as in NYC/London. Supply and demand are both issues, there is a lot of the latter and too little of the former. But to say that Toronto has transformed into one of the richest cities on Earth simply isn't true in any regard except its housing market. And that is precisely the problem - it has the housing market of London with the salaries of Cleveland.