Income that covers a life
Measure earnings, employment take-home, public transfers, and what remains after essential costs. Keep the contribution of wages and benefits visible.
Income · Housing · Shared prosperity
A better living standard.
Built to last in BC.
Everyone should be able to afford a secure home and the essentials of a decent life. Living Standard BC studies income and housing together, and asks who benefits from the economic gains our communities create.
Our purpose is to identify coordinated policies that improve lasting affordability: better household incomes, obtainable housing, and a fairer distribution of gains, with viable services and new supply.
What we need to understand
Housing people can obtain
Study market-entry rents, essential utilities, and housing availability separately. A price benchmark alone cannot show whether a home is available.
Where the gains go
Examine how economic gains reach workers, owners, and communities, and what capacity exists to improve wages and rents while sustaining services and new supply.
Low pay alone does not establish avoidable surplus capture. Revenue is not profit, and gross rent is not a landlord’s return. We will test the capacity to close affordability gaps and publish uncertainty where the evidence is incomplete.
Current work · 19 September 2026
Building the evidence base
The research code has starting configurations for Nelson, Grand Forks, Kelowna, Prince George, Greater Victoria, and Metro Vancouver. Nelson is the first intended regional baseline within a province-wide project.
The next steps are to validate evidence at release, complete rental collection and utility inputs, independently check income calculations, and map sources on economic distribution.
Read the research roadmap →Methods you can inspect
Building on existing research
Living Wage BC already includes single adults, single parents, and two-parent families in its weighted headline rate. Our contribution is to connect household outcomes, market-entry housing evidence, and the distribution of gains in coordinated policy analysis.
Living Wage BC’s methodology →Clear limits to public reproduction
Public code and test fixtures let readers inspect the arithmetic. Raw archives, rental records, and the live evidence ledger stay private. The repository alone cannot reproduce a rental survey. A safe official-source export and stronger release validation are still to be implemented.
The workflow acquires official documents, archives and hashes them, records evidence, assembles costs, and runs an exploratory solver. A matching hash verifies file integrity; it does not validate a source’s interpretation.
Help make the research stronger
Contributors can review utility assumptions, check household definitions, independently verify an income calculation, or map public sources on profits, rental costs, and ownership flows. No coding is required for these reviews.
support@livingstandardbc.orgSupport mailbox setup is in progress.