Though many of our cities have a bad reputation for being untenably expensive for buyers and renters alike, there is one housing market in Canada that has just been ranked the most affordable in the world.

Demographia, which has been ranking international middle-income housing affordability for more than 15 years, has named Fort McMurray, Alberta as the most affordable for real estate out of more than 300 places in nine countries.

The organization's 2020 survey says that residents of the city only need about 1.8 times the median income to purchase a median home.

This is compared to Toronto, where it takes 8.6 times the city's median income to be able to afford a median home, or Vancouver, where it takes a whopping 11.9 times (making it the second least affordable major housing market in the report).

Fort Mac is known best for its lucrative oilsands — its Junior A hockey team is even named the Fort McMurray Oil Barons — as well as for the wildfire that wreaked havoc in the city and surrounding area in 2016.

Its full-time population has dropped since the fire, and now sits around 75,000 (111,000 if the "shadow population" of temporary residents is taken into account). The recent affordability of real estate in the Alberta locale is largely attributed to high salaries paired with serious economic disruption in the oil industry and transport shortages, among other factors, Demographia says.

Fredericton and Saint John, New Brunswick, also made it onto the list of the top 10 most affordable markets, which was dominated by U.S. municipalities.

Though this new data indicates what we all knew — that the country as a whole is seeing housing prices drastically increasing ahead of income amid a declining housing supply — at least Canadians can now have a bit of a better idea of where they should and shouldn't head when they're priced out of our major cities. 

(But don't expect the quality of the nightlife, entertainment and food scenes in Fort Mac to rival those of Toronto or Vancouver.)