Toronto (or the GTA more specifically) was the cheaper version of Vancouver. Now the average house price is north of C$1m in a country where average wages are a fraction of that.
People live in cities often because that's where the owrk is. A lot of people like it too. Some jobs can be remote. Many can't. You can't be a nurse or a mechanic or an EMT or a firefighter remotely. Toronto needs all those so-called "essential workers" too. Where are they supposed to live?
The general pattern has been in Canada (and the US and other places) is that you have starter homes like condos and then you buy a house when you want or need more space (eg you have children). The commenter I replied to buy a condo for just shy of C$600k. At that time maybe a house they might move up to was $900k. $300k is a lot but probably doable. Now their condo is $1.2m that house is probably $1.5-2m. It's actually more relatively unaffordable than at the time they bought their condo.
You see what I mean when rising prices for a basic necessity you cannot live without actually don't increase wealth?
Wealth is defined as the purchasing power across all possible consumption baskets - not just the one that you want though. So if you measure the value of your house in bananas, or oranges, or bars of chocolate, it’s value has definitely gone up.
But this collective delusion that the house prices of homeowners has gone up is a huge part of the problem, in part because if house prices halved, it would be a huge problem but probably not as large as people think, mainly because people can largely just walk away from underwater mortgages (in Canada AFAIK).
The only people who benefit are those hoarding real estate, not individual homeowners. This is the core problem with neoliberal private property.