Victoria Livingstone, 21, at her Sydney, NS, apartment. Livingstone, who works four jobs, says she is ‘very, very aware’ that if she lost her full-time job, she’d be homeless.Steve Wadden/The Globe and Mail
Raised in a low-income home, with parents haunted by debt, Victoria Livingstone dreamed about the house she would own one day.
“Some people picture their dream wedding or travelling the world,” she says. “My dream was stability. It was having a home that was mine, and that I knew nobody could ever take away from me.”
Ms. Livingstone is only 21, but that dream already feels as if it’s slipping away. She’s working four jobs in Sydney, N.S., and still living paycheque to paycheque, relying on monthly visits to the food bank while financially supporting her younger sister. She shares the cost of a $1,200-plus-utilities apartment with her boyfriend; unsure they’d find another place, they paid rent while waiting a year for the broken fridge to be replaced. She’s “very, very aware” that if she lost her full-time job, she’d be homeless.
“It could absolutely happen to me at any given point,” she says, “and it’s just like this terrifying instability.”
Analysis: Housing affordability has been improving. It’s not enough and may not last much longer
New research published online Friday suggests what Ms. Livingstone and many young Canadians already know: The housing crisis is a happiness crisis.
The study analyzed the Canadian sample of the Gallup World Poll, which asks people to rank their lives on a 10-step ladder, collecting 1,000 responses from nearly 150 countries each year.
Between 2008 and 2025, the analysis found that economic stress accounted for roughly half of a steep decline in life satisfaction reported by Canadians ages 20 to 34, as well as the widening happiness gap between young adults and citizens older than 65. They reached this conclusions by weighing responses regarding 14 different possible contributing factors, both social and economic.
Among all the economic factors crushing the happiness of young people, housing affordability was the largest.
“Young adults experienced larger increases in economic hardship, and their well-being is more sensitive to it,” write the study’s co-authors, Haifang Huang, a University of Alberta economist, and John Helliwell, a UBC professor emeritus and a founding director of the World Happiness Report.
Young Canadians have cause to feel hammered at every financial angle. Average housing costs have fallen recently in most provinces – but rents remain well above prepandemic levels, and home prices are outpacing wages. Surveys suggest that one-third of Gen Z Canadians are eating less because of finances, or borrowing to buy food. According to Canada’s Labour Market Information Council, half of the entry-level job postings for graduates with a bachelor’s degree vanished between 2024 and 2025.
The Gallup World Poll also surveys respondents on whether they had enough money to buy food or pay for housing in the last year, and how they view the job market.
Dr. Huang and Dr. Helliwell found that over nearly two decades, the percentage of young Canadians reporting food or shelter insecurity more than doubled. They were also three times more likely to report worsening living standards. Before 2015, young adults were more optimistic about the job market than their parents or grandparents; as of 2025, they are the most pessimistic.
Analysis: A story of affordability: How Canada’s housing market shifted in 2025
Melissa Miles, a psychotherapist in Milton, Ont., sees her twentysomething patients wrestling with the shame of not meeting society’s expectations, the strain of needing to live with their parents and the despair that builds when they’re doing everything right and getting nowhere.
Many of her clients, she says, are missing out on important life lessons and human connections, delaying romance or neglecting friendship because they don’t have time or finances.
“I mostly worry about them losing a sense of hope that things can be different,” Ms. Miles says.
Over the last 10 years, Canada has had one of the most precipitous declines in youthful happiness in the world, according to Gallup data. But young people report falling life satisfaction in many Western countries.
Social media is usually the headline villain, although, as Dr. Huang and Dr. Helliwell note, Asian and Eastern European young people have similar exposure to social media, and in those countries their happiness is rising.
In their analysis, Dr. Huang and Dr. Helliwell found that other issues such as health, institutional trust and social support produced little change in how young people in Canada evaluated their lives.
However, in a companion paper comparing six English-speaking countries (and also released Friday) they found that, as in Canada, economic factors were responsible for roughly half of the happiness decline in the United States, New Zealand and Austria. The pattern often tracked with specific economic conditions in each country, suggesting the drop in subjective well-being is based less on opinions or feeling, and more on the challenges that young people are actually experiencing. Ireland and the United Kingdom were outliers in the group; the role of the economy was less clear.
Kahlea Wells works at her childhood home in Welland, Ont. Wells, a PHD student at Carleton University, is currently researching the toll that housing takes on young Canadians, something she is experiencing herself.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail
Kahlea Wells, a 26-year-old graduate student in Ottawa, is researching the mental health toll that high rent and food prices are taking on her generation – even while roughly 60 per cent of her own income goes to a 400-square-foot bachelor apartment.
“It’s not lost on me that I am researching housing insecurity while also facing housing insecurity,” she says.
If anything, she’s surprised housing and the economy don’t play a larger role in her generation’s unhappiness. Her conversations with friends are consumed by stress about finances, the lack of jobs and the rising cost of groceries.
“It’s really sad when twentysomethings get excited about grocery for a deal,” she says.
Staying in: When grown children decide to live with their parents
Some young Canadians are standing up for themselves and creating their own solutions.
In the Toronto area, a Gen Z-led organization called HOUSE will purchase its first home in May. Supported by student unions, the group was formed to lease and buy buildings near universities and turn them into safe, affordable student housing.
Co-executive director Nathi Zamisa lived in one of its first leased buildings while at university. He sees students couch-surfing, living with broken windows or being summarily evicted by opportunistic landlords.
These are not just Gen Z issues, he says. Some parents are also bearing the cost, helping their kids cover high rents or going into debt to provide down payments – a decision Mr. Zamisa’s mother made to help him buy a condo.
Ms. Wells, meanwhile, will be one of the presenters at Carleton University’s 12-week Housing Advocacy Field School starting this month to educate young activists on how to work for more equitable housing.
Ms. Livingstone would be at university right now if she wasn’t “so terrified” of going into debt for a degree that may not pay off. Instead, she’ll be attending the field school’s online classes, fitting them in between her full-time job as a client co-ordinator for the Nova Scotia Native Women’s Association and part-time role as a Canada Post clerk, as well as her occasional research assistant position and casual shifts as a support worker at the local homeless shelter.
She wants to be part of the solution – to make safe, stable housing a basic need that everyone can afford instead of a luxury item her generation can’t access.
She rhymes off the Gen Z stereotypes: “No one your age wants to work. Everybody’s so lazy. Everyone’s just living off their parents.”
Those complaints fail to see how demoralizing economic forces are shoving young adults down. People need to understand what they’re really facing, Ms. Livingstone says. “We need to wake up and realize those tables can turn so quickly, and any of us could be facing housing insecurity tomorrow.”
