This week: A comparison of cities in Canada and the U.S. and their affordability rankings over the last 20 years, and the renovations that make a big difference without having to do a full gut-job. Plus, one home that’s worth a look.

It’s impossible to talk about affordability over the last decade without talking about housing, for both Canada and the United States. Personal finance writer Hanif Bayat took a look at when and where that became the case, and the results paint a picture of costs that have become increasingly difficult to manage.

To measure housing unaffordability, he used the benchmark of the ratio of home prices to median household income and tracked that ratio in 2005, 2015 and 2025 to highlight which markets deteriorated the most over time. Among the cities with the steepest declines in affordability are Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, and Dallas and Charlotte, N.C., in the United States.

There’s a throughline in the most unaffordable cities: All of them are located in areas with stricter zoning and land-use rules, where housing supply struggles to expand in a timely way as demand rises.

Click here to see the full chart.

The third edition of our Most Livable Cities ranking produced some interesting results, thanks to a new way to separate the list by population. Ottawa came out as the most livable major city, with North Vancouver (two-time overall No. 1), West Vancouver and Pitt Meadows, B.C. coming out on top of their respective size categories.

But why did these cities rank so highly, and what does it mean for those living there or considering a move? Last week, data editor Mahima Singh, consumer affairs reporter Mariya Postelnyak and reporter Andrew Galbraith answered reader questions on the latest edition of the ranking. Check out what they had to say about our methodology, and what makes each of the top cities so great.

The thinking behind Canada’s banking regulator’s latest move appears to be that this country’s chartered banks can’t manage their mortgage businesses on their own. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions has rebuffed calls to lower the mortgage stress test and is now also adding loan-to-income requirements to guide a bank’s overall mortgage lending.

The regulator’s surprising announcement in OSFI’s January quarterly release had a self-congratulatory title, “continuing to advance smart, well-calibrated risk-taking.” But as John Turley-Ewart argues, what OSFI calls “smart”, the Bank of England calls “resilience at any cost,” a policy that overregulates the bank mortgage market – with “adverse” consequences.

The cost will be high, and as Turley-Ewart writes, first-time homebuyers and anyone trying to move up or seek more space will be the ones who pay.

Rates shown are the lowest available for each term/type and category (insured vs. uninsured) as of market close on Thursday, Feb. 12.

Full-blown renovations are expensive, but you don’t need to go down to the studs to make a difference in your home. From jazzing up an unin