The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday edition that despite a steep drop in Canadian house prices, affordability has still not recovered to historic norms. The Globe's Jason Kirby writes that in July, the benchmark home price across Canada stood at $661,800, a 21.3-per-cent decline from its peak in March, 2022. The plunge is even more pronounced after factoring in inflation, which ran hot for several years and recently has climbed back up to the top end of the Bank of Canada's inflation target range of 1 to 3 per cent. Real house prices have fallen back to where they were in 2016, a drop of nearly 30 per cent from the peak. That's helped housing affordability recover from the worst period of deterioration since the 1990s, but as BMO chief economist Doug Porter said in a note, "The glass remains half empty." The Bank of Canada's housing affordability index, which tracks housing-related costs -- in particular, mortgage payments and utility bills -- relative to average household disposable incomes, still sits well above its long-run normal. There are a limited number of ways affordability can "get back to normal," Mr. Porter wrote. The ideal path would be for Canadian incomes to push higher, but the process is slow.