A national survey found one in five Canadian boomers have a child living at home, a number experts blame on high housing costs..Last month, Leger surveyed 2,000 people born between 1947 and 1966 for Royal LePage. The online poll found 24% of Albertan boomers had children living at home, compared to just 14% in Atlantic Canada. For major cities, the percentages were 28 in Vancouver, 26 in Toronto, and 20 in Montreal..In an interview with Western Standard, Wendell Cox, fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, said that “urban containment” in city planning has created artificially high prices for Canadian housing and some American cities have made the same poor choices..“The whole Pacific Coast has done the same thing, and parts of the East Coast. For the most part, the Midwest and the South are in pretty good shape,” said Cox, who has been principal of Demographia in St. Louis, Missouri for 35 years..“You had a good country before you started this stuff, there’s nothing wrong with it. And the middle class could afford housing everywhere, including Vancouver.”.Cox said immigration is not to blame for the high cost of housing..“It doesn’t matter whether the people that extra come from China or the Northwest Territories. The fact is that you do not have enough land to develop because the planning system won’t let you develop. Prices were already out of control in the mid-90s, but things really exploded in the mid-2000s.”.Cox said before urban planners tried to limit urban sprawl, the median cost of housing was roughly three times median annual income all over the western world. Today in Vancouver, median housing is 13 times the cost of annual income, a ratio four times worse than it was there in 1969..“In Regina, the housing affordability isn’t too bad. It’s about 3.3. That’s almost like it was historically and Saskatoon not bad,” Cox said..“It hasn’t been as bad in Alberta. [Prior to] the oil bust…it was really pretty bad. But the house values have dropped substantially because the demand is dropped.”.High housing costs could have been avoided almost everywhere, Cox said..“All you needed to do was stay out of the way and that’s the battle I’ve been fighting all this time.”.The survey found 65% of working boomers don’t consider their current region affordable and 42% might move elsewhere near or during retirement..In Ottawa, Carleton University business professor Ian Lee told Western Standard the circumstances that keep grown-up children at home are varied..“Some are doing it because they’re unemployed,” Lee said..“Some are staying home because they have a close relationship with their parents and the parents have encouraged them. They said, ‘Look you can go and have fun, you can travel around the world, that you can save on that rent you would be paying.’”.James’ daughter lived with him from the ages of 26 to 30 to save money for a down payment on a home..“I didn’t need the money. And so she lived here for four years absolutely rent-free, never paid a penny. And [my partner’s] daughter lived [in her mom’s house] for almost four years rent-free, not even utilities. And then she used that to buy a house.”.A quarter of boomers surveyed, and 34% in Vancouver, said they already had or would consider gifting or loaning money to a child to help them buy a home..The survey found 54% of boomers have paid off their mortgage. For those pondering a move within the next five years, 63% would consider downsizing, and of those, 9% would do so to help their kids buy a home..Twenty-one percent of Canadian boomers with kids at home don’t foresee them leaving, but fewer in Alberta and B.C. feel this way, at 8% and 12% respectively..Lee Harding is a Saskatchewan-based correspondent for Western Standard.
