The Impossible White Picket Fence: Housing Affordability Grief in Canada
Canadian Millennials and Gen-Zers alike grew up with an idea of what their future would look like as they reached adulthood. Becoming financially independent, moving out, and eventually buying a home were all traditional milestones of adulthood that many of us saw as the norm growing up. As the future started to become the present, many of us began feeling a jarring shift.
The housing landscape has completely changed in just one generation. The classic dream of the “white picket fence” has hit a wall in Canada. With interest rates holding steady and real estate prices locked at historically high plateaus, a stark reality has set in for millions of Canadians: buying a house feels entirely unattainable. In fact, surveys show that 55% of Millennials and 58% of Gen Zers feel that buying a home is not in the cards.
In 2021, 16.3% of millennials between 25 to 39 lived with their parents compared to only 8.2% of baby boomers, almost double the number. Millennials have the lowest rate of homeownership compared to Gen-Xers and baby boomers when they were 25 to 39 years old. Of those that do have homes, less were less likely to live in single-detached houses relative to earlier generations, especially those living in Toronto and Vancouver. For Gen-Zers, this reality doesn’t seem to be shifting.
This isn’t just an economic crisis; it is a mental health crisis, too. I have clients coming in who fantasized about and planned for a future that no longer feels in reach. It isn’t just stressful, it’s also a situation that causes many a great deal of financial grief. If you are feeling left behind, exhausted, or angry, you are absolutely not alone. It is time to talk about the psychological toll of today’s economy and how we can better engage with the realities around us.
In this article, I break down the following:
- Understanding financial grief and housing anxiety in Canada
- Defining financial grief
- Coping with financial stress without blaming yourself
- When therapy is not enough: what civic involvement looks like
I want to make it clear that the point of this article is not to fall into a “doomer” mindset, without hope or possibility for change. My goal is to help readers reconcile the difficult contrast between their parents’ and grandparents’ generations and their own in such a way that we don’t hold ourselves entirely personally responsible for systems that are different from the ones we saw growing up.
This article is meant to provide clarity, and help us find both personal coping skills and community involvement strategies that can shift our internal and material realities.
Understanding Financial Grief and Housing Anxiety in Canada
Something that’s important to acknowledge outright is that the current housing lock out is a structural economic issue, not the personal failings of younger generations; even the Canadian government acknowledges it.
It’s an established fact that housing prices have risen exponentially high compared to incomes, while wages, employment stability, and access to affordable housing have not kept pace. For a ton of younger Canadians, the problem isn’t that they haven’t saved enough, worked hard enough, or made the “right” financial decisions. The math just doesn’t work in the same way it did for previous generations.
When we internalize a structural problem as a personal failure, we tend to respond with shame. We ask ourselves what we’re doing wrong. Should we be working more? Spending less? Moving somewhere cheaper? Taking on a side hustle? And while some of these choices may be practical or necessary for individual circumstances, they don’t address the larger reality that the baseline cost of adulthood has fundamentally changed.
The psychological cost of housing insecurity
Housing anxiety isn’t only about whether or not you can qualify for a mortgage. It can affect how you experience safety, adulthood, independence, relationships, and even your sense of identity. Housing represents stability, privacy, belonging, and autonomy. When that’s out of reach, it can create a real sense of anxiety and uncertainty.
These thoughts can become particularly painful when we compare ourselves to parents, relatives, or peers who reached milestones that now require dramatically different economic circumstances.
This is where financial grief becomes an important framework.
What is financial grief?
Grief isn’t limited to the death of a person. We can experience grief when we lose a future we expected to have. Financial grief can emerge when the life we planned for becomes inaccessible, or when we realize that the milestones we assumed were ordinary are no longer guaranteed. There is a loss involved, even if nothing tangible was taken away from us.
You may be grieving the house you imagined yourself living in, the timeline you thought you would follow, the ability to live independently without making significant financial sacrifices, or even a version of adulthood that you were taught to expect.
This grief can be exacerbated by the “comparison trap.” One of the most difficult parts of housing affordability is that we are constantly surrounded by evidence of what we believe we are missing.
Social media gives us a front-row seat to other people’s lives. We see friends buying condos, getting married, renovating kitchens, having children, and moving into houses with yards. We see the finished product without necessarily seeing the inheritance, parental assistance, dual income, timing, debt, or other circumstances that made that life possible.
Even outside of social media, family comparisons can be tough. A parent might casually say, “When I was your age, we bought our first house,” without realizing that the statement carries an entirely different economic context today.
This doesn’t mean previous generations didn’t work hard or that every older Canadian had an easy path to homeownership. Of course, individual experiences vary enormously. What has changed is the economic environment in which that work takes place. We can respect the sacrifices previous generations made while still acknowledging that younger generations are facing a different set of constraints.
Coping with financial stress without blaming yourself
When financial stress is coming from circumstances that are largely outside of your control, it can be difficult to understand how to cope.
There is a difference between taking responsibility for the financial decisions that are within your control and taking personal responsibility for an economic environment that you did not create. For many younger Canadians, those lines can become blurred.
We are constantly given advice about how to “get ahead”: budget better, stop spending money on unnecessary things, work harder, save more, invest earlier. There is value in being financially informed and making thoughtful decisions with the resources we have, but these strategies can only go so far when the cost of housing, food, transportation, and other necessities has risen beyond what many incomes can comfortably accommodate. At some point, we need recognize that the problem is no longer that you need to manage your money better.
When we turn financial circumstances into judgments about who we are, shame can make an already difficult situation even harder to navigate. We may avoid looking at our finances because they make us feel inadequate, compare ourselves to friends who appear to be further ahead, overwork ourselves in an attempt to catch up, or deprive ourselves of anything enjoyable because we feel guilty spending money. All of this can create a cycle where financial stress produces shame, shame produces avoidance or overcompensation, and those behaviours create even more stress.
Part of coping is learning how to interrupt that cycle. One place to start is by separating what is within your control from what isn’t. You may be able to control your spending habits, your savings goals, the financial advice you seek, or whether you apply for a different job. You cannot personally control housing prices, mortgage rates, rental supply, wage stagnation, or the policies that shape the housing market.
That distinction doesn’t mean giving up hope, it means putting responsibility in the right place. You can ask yourself:
- What can I realistically change?
- What do I need to accept for now?
- What am I blaming myself for that was never actually in my power?
Therapy can be helpful in addressing some of these questions and helping up engage with those realities in a more sustainable way. It’s worth acknowledging, however, that therapy only addresses the symptom of a system that isn’t working rather than the system itself.
When Therapy Is Not Enough
There is an important piece of this conversation that therapists should be willing to acknowledge: Some problems cannot be solved in the therapy room.
If someone is experiencing financial stress because their rent has increased beyond what their income can reasonably support, teaching them breathing exercises is not going to make their rent cheaper. If someone is working full-time and still cannot afford stable housing, telling them to simply “manage their anxiety” can unintentionally send the message that the problem is their reaction to the situation, rather than the situation itself.
Therapy can help someone cope with uncertainty, regulate their nervous system, challenge shame, and make thoughtful decisions under stress, but we also have to be careful not to individualize problems that are fundamentally structural. Sometimes distress is an appropriate response to difficult circumstances.
This is important to note because there is a tendency in mental health spaces to frame psychological wellness as an entirely individual responsibility. We talk about resilience, coping skills, boundaries, mindfulness, and reframing, but resilience should not become another way of asking people to tolerate conditions that are genuinely harmful.
Moving from individual coping to collective action
When we are dealing with something as enormous as the Canadian housing crisis, it can be easy to feel powerless. Housing policy, interest rates, zoning, rental supply, wages, taxation, immigration, infrastructure, and government policy can all feel so far removed from our individual lives that it seems impossible to know where to begin.
Feeling powerless and actually being powerless are not necessarily the same thing. Studies show that there are real benefits to participating in the systems that shape our communities. This might mean voting in municipal, provincial, and federal elections. It might mean contacting elected representatives about housing policy. It might mean attending local council meetings, learning about development proposals in your community, joining a tenants’ organization, supporting housing advocacy, or simply becoming more informed about how housing decisions are actually made.
None of this means that an individual person is responsible for fixing the housing crisis. The point is that we should not be expected to individually solve a collective problem, rather that collective problems require collective participation.
There is also something psychologically meaningful about this shift. When our entire experience of the housing crisis is “I can’t afford a house,” it can become a very isolating problem. We compare ourselves to other individuals and assume that everyone else has somehow figured it out. When we begin asking, “Why is housing unaffordable for so many people?” the frame changes. The problem becomes something we can investigate, discuss, organize around, and advocate for together. That doesn’t make the financial stress disappear but it can replace some of the shame and isolation with understanding and agency.
The Balance Between Therapy and Collectivity
I believe in therapy wholeheartedly. I have seen the changes therapy can make in people’s lives, helping them better function more fully and engage with the people, relationships, and activities that matter most to them. However, therapy is largely an individual endeavor, and I deeply believe some challenges also require communal support and a broader understanding of the systems and conditions in which we live.
Of course, individual and societal factors are not mutually exclusive. Mental health does not exist independently of our material circumstances, relationships, or social environments. Bettering our psychological and emotional well-being can help us show up more fully for our communities and engage in meaningful collective action.
I truly believe the most effective approaches hold these realities together. They help us better understand ourselves while also encouraging us to understand the world around us, and to recognize how the two continually shape one another.
If this approach resonates with you, reach out. Book a free 15-minute consultation to learn more about my approach and see whether we might be a good fit, or send me an email with any questions.
