The numbers confirm it: far more millennials live with their parents than the baby boomer generation did at their age, a new Statistics Canada study shows.
Housing affordability has been on the decline in Canada since 2011, a Wednesday study — titled ‘Millennials in the Canadian housing market’ — shows.
In 2021, 16.3 per cent of millennials between the ages of 25 and 39 were living with at least one parent.
This figure is almost twice the proportion of baby boomers (8.2 per cent) living with their parents in 1991, when they were in the same age range. When Gen X Canadians were in that age range, in 2006, that figure was 12.2 per cent.
In 2021, more than one in four (26.1 per cent) millennials in Toronto lived with a parent, compared to almost one in five (19.3 per cent) millennials in Vancouver, according to Statistics Canada data.
By contrast, there has been a sharp drop in the number of people in the 25-39 age group living with a spouse or a child.
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In 1991, almost three in four (74.4 per cent) people in that age range lived with a spouse or a child, compared to less than two in three (62.8 per cent) in 2021. In 2006, that figure was 69.7 per cent.
Millennials also had a lower rate of homeownership (49.9 per cent) in 2021 than their Gen X (56.2 per cent) counterparts in 2006 and baby boomer (55.9 per cent) counterparts in 1991.
In addition to higher mortgage costs, new homebuyers are also struggling with the cost of buying starter homes in today’s housing market, a recent report by the University of Ottawa’s Missing Middle Initiative showed.
While incomes in Canada have risen 76 per cent since 2004, the price of a new home at the lower end of the market has risen by 265 per cent, the analysis said.
“Brand-new family-sized starter homes are over twice as expensive relative to income as they were 20 years ago. And unless governments get serious about bringing down the cost of homebuilding, it will take another 20 years to fix,” economist Mike Moffat said in the report.
The report added that even if home prices stopped rising entirely, it would take 25 years for the price-to-income ratio to reach the levels they were at in 2004.
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