Young Canadians are facing more obstacles on the way to their own home

A dream of homeownership has been one of the main in the lives of many Americans. And amid the U.S. real estate market collapse in the mid-2000s, when mortgage rates went down sharply, many Canadian and American observers noted that Canada was outpacing America in terms of homeownership. By 2011, Canada’s homeownership rate (the share of households with their own homes) went down from 69% in 2004 to 66%, and several years later fell to even less than 64%.

However, the previous 10 years have shown homeownership rates in the two countries getting closer to each other: in 2021, the gap between them was only 1% (66.5% in Canada, 65.5% in the U.S.), as ownership levels in the U.S. recovered, while growing numbers of Canadians were priced out of the market by double-digit increases.

When Statistics Canada pointed to the downturn in homeownership rates in 2021, it turned out young adults got the strongest hit. The home ownership rate for Canadians aged 30-34 was down from 59.2% to 52.3%. The decline was even more vivid in case of the 25-29 age group: the rate fell by 7.6% to 36.5%.

Those decreases look even more significant if we compare them to the U.S. results. During the period from 2011 to 2021, young-adult ownership rates were almost unchanged. Moreover, in case of 25-29-year-olds, it was even up. Although ownership levels remain slightly higher for young Canadians, the tendency of the previous ten years points to a strong deterioration of the ownership dream for young people in Canada.