We struggle with The Economist's definition of a city's liveability

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit it is Auckland, in New Zealand, that is the world’s most liveable city:

The Covid-19 pandemic has shaken up the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual ranking of most liveable cities, propelling Auckland to top spot in place of Vienna, which crashed out of the top 10 altogether as the island nations of New Zealand, Australia and Japan fared best.

We rather struggle with this as we’re entirely certain that we’ve seen piece after piece detailing Auckland’s terrible problem with anyone finding housing in it:

The Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey rates housing affordability using the "median multiple", a measure of median house price divided by median household income.

Authors Wendell Cox and Hugh Pavletich ranks as affordable cities where the median price is up to three times the median wage. Areas are classed as moderately unaffordable when the ratio is up to four, seriously unaffordable between four and five and severely unaffordable when the ratio is more than five times income.

....

Auckland, at nine times income, was severely unaffordable, and up from 5.9 in 2004. The country as a whole also ranks in this range, with a ratio of 6.5. Auckland is the seventh-least affordable city of the 91 major housing markets surveyed.

Perhaps liveable city is meant to be defined as one people can’t afford to live in. Or possibly that which makes it liveable by the EIU’s criteria is what makes it so ghastly expensive to be there. Or even, it is necessary to have an entirely absurd planning system in order to meet the EIU’s definition of liveability.

Our struggle is really that we just find it difficult to think of a place where median housing is near ten times median income as being liveable. Certainly, we’d not suggest it as somewhere to emulate.