Canadian dream lost? How unaffordable housing is hurting young British Columbians
As their financial futures grow uncertain, half of the province’s young people are considering moving elsewhere

The average price of a residence in Greater Vancouver is about $1.25 million. (James Timmins)

Jayden Lowe’s journey as a young renter has involved making sacrifices. When he moved to Vancouver Island to attend the University of Victoria in 2020, his first place was a three-bedroom basement suite, which he shared with multiple roommates.
Although his rent was only $650 before utilities, it came at the cost of his comfort and privacy. The building was rundown, and walking out of his bedroom would sometimes mean finding his landlord standing in the kitchen.
“You just feel violated,” Lowe says. “There are so many levels of wrong with that.”
After completing his studies, Lowe, 23, who is from White Rock and works as a web developer, returned to the Lower Mainland in 2023 and has been living in Langley’s Willoughby community with a roommate. While he’s paying much more than what he did in Victoria, the building is newer and much nicer.
Lowe also thinks about his future and eventually buying a house with a backyard to raise a family, just like the upbringing he and his neighbours had. But when considering the issue of housing affordability, the idea of leaving the province has crossed his mind.
“Thinking about how the cost of buying a house is like, ‘OK, do I have to go live in some town in Saskatchewan that no one’s ever heard of?’ But all of that — and for the now side of things — would be very dependent on my career,” he says.
Working 32 hours per week, Jules, a 23-year-old computational mathematics student at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, lives with two other roommates in a Surrey basement suite, paying $750 per month, which does not include utilities. Along with staying in a small room with little space, they are also living on a tighter budget.
“Essentially, I make rent, then I make my food,” says Jules, who asked that their last name not be used in the story. “Then, if nothing goes wrong, I also make my tuition for the next semester on like two to three courses, instead of [the expected] four to five for my four-year degree.”
In B.C., one-in-two 18 to 34 year olds are seriously considering leaving the province because of the cost of housing, an Angus Reid survey from June found.
At the start of 2024, the average price of a residence in B.C. was almost $958,000 — or about $1.25 million when just looking at Greater Vancouver, the British Columbia Real Estate Association reported.
In 1994, the average price of a home in Vancouver was about eight times the average household income. Last year, the home-price-to-income ratio was just over 14, which is a 75-per-cent increase over the past 30 years, Ratesdotca found.
When it comes to renting, four out of Canada’s five most expensive cities are within Metro Vancouver — West Vancouver, North Vancouver, Vancouver, and Burnaby. The average rent for an unfurnished, one-bedroom unit in the region is $2,359, liv.rent reported in November.
Paul Kershaw, a University of British Columbia policy professor and founder of Generation Squeeze, a non-profit that advocates for generational fairness, believes fostering a province where young people want to stay requires accurately framing the housing issue.
“I think until we articulate to one another,” Kershaw says, “and we look one another in the eyes and in the mirror and we say, ‘Wait a second, we are asking a younger demographic and newcomers of any age to sacrifice their standard of living in order to protect wealth that has been gained by others in the housing sector who entered it earlier.’ If we don’t acknowledge as much, then we don’t understand how [we got] here and why [we sustained] the problem.”
He adds rising home prices aren’t uniformly bad since they can financially help people.
“If we were to have a significant burst of the real-estate balloon in Canada, that would pose a range of political challenges for politicians, in part, because many [people] who had been just counting on the value they’ve gained on their home for retirement would [then] be quite angry,” Kershaw says.
“But notice, we’re then wanting to protect one demographic at the expense of another — and we don’t really describe it that way.”
Provincially, Kershaw finds compensating young people for sacrificing their standard of living to protect older generations’ nest eggs could go ahead without any changes to taxation. Instead, the government could reassess its budget.
“Most of the new money is going to medical care for the aging population,” he says. “[The province can say], ‘We’re not going to do that as much and we’re going to leave more money to invest in housing and child care and post-secondary to reduce some of the other major costs in the lives of young people.’”
Another possibility, Kershaw says, could be introducing young-age security, like the existing old-age security, or a young person’s tax credit for people under 35, similar to an age credit already existing for those over 65.
“Likely, though, there would be a massive human cry in British Columbia if we started saying we’re not going to have medical-care spending grow as quickly.”
However, he says there are more resources at the federal level that can be shifted, such as asking affluent baby boomers with household incomes over six figures to accept slightly lower old-age security benefits. The money can then be reallocated to federal housing investments and other areas like post-secondary education, child care, and eliminating poverty among seniors.
Kershaw also advocates for having owners of homes valued at over $1 million or $1.5 million to contribute more annually through a provincial or federal property tax. By doing so, he says taxes can be reduced for lower and middle-income earners, who are disproportionally young people, and the funds can then be made available to invest in younger generations.
During the provincial election campaign last fall, BC Conservative Party Leader John Rustad repeatedly brought up the statistic from Angus Reid that one-in-two young people are considering leaving the province, something Kershaw took note of.
“Never once did I hear Mr. Rustad then say, in response, ‘Oh, the people who’ve been benefiting from what’s causing these others to leave could maybe contribute a little bit more to make it easier for their kids’ and grandchildren’s generations to stay,’” he says.
“And if you don’t have that, then we don’t have a strategy to invest. Whether it’s Mr. Rustad’s platform or [Premier David Eby’s] platform, neither of those parties were [offering] platforms that were disproportionately using tax dollars to reduce some of the affordability challenges for younger people.”
Beyond home ownership, B.C. also struggles with the lowest security of tenure — which is the right to continue living in your home — of any other province in the country, says Craig E. Jones, associate director of the Housing Research Collaborative and Housing Assessment Resource Tools, two UBC-based research groups.
“The five-year eviction rate, which we estimate, is around 10 per cent,” Jones says. “So in a five-year period, every renter has a 10-per-cent chance — [or] about two per cent per year — of being evicted within that period of time.”
This is an issue Lowe worries will affect him.
At the end of this past summer, he and his roommate were looking to extend their lease, which involved a back and forth with the landlord. While the two renters were eventually able to renegotiate their lease for another year, they are feeling uneasy about something else — the uncertainty about what the owner’s future plans for the property could be.
“We could be kicked out within 30 days anytime …. Mainly, for us, we want the security,” Lowe says.
A key challenge, Jones says, is that there are not enough good forms of tenure options in B.C., but there is a growing prevalence in purpose-built rentals, also known as build-to-rent homes, and non-market housing, where the housing provider is non-profit and driven to provide housing for people.
He also says it is not new that a survey has come out suggesting a large percentage of young people want to leave B.C. For example, in 2022, Research Co. found almost half of young B.C. residents aged 18 to 34 were thinking about eventually leaving the province at some point in their lives.
Young people tend to move a lot more than others, Jones says, adding within the last year — from 2023 to 2024 — B.C. has been attracting less people from other provinces to move here. After four years of strong net-positive growth of young people moving to this province rather than residents leaving, the numbers are starting to level. In B.C., interprovincial migration makes up a much smaller segment of population growth when compared to international migration, which is the main driver.
However, Jones finds it still remains a compelling statistic that half of young people are seriously considering leaving the province.
“There’s nothing unusual about young people considering moving, and the data absolutely supports that,” Jones says. “Now, do we want to see that continue …? That would be terrible. Younger people are the future of this province, the future of the economy, and B.C. needs to attract and retain young people to strengthen our economy and our culture, society, all that stuff.”
In the meantime, Lowe remains committed to owning a home one day. If that dream continues to be out of reach in B.C.’s housing market, he says it would be on him to change careers and land a better paying job.
“I could foresee owning an apartment someday, which is an accomplishment for anybody, but that’s not the goal,” Lowe says. “I don’t think that’s the goal for many Canadians.”