More 25–34-year-olds are living with their parents in cities in Ontario… but not in Alberta and Quebec.
Playing around with some census data.
TL;DR: The percentage of 25–34-year-olds living with their parents in Ontario communities like London, Guelph, and Barrie rose substantially from 2001 to 2016. Yet the proportion stayed relatively steady in other Canadian cities like Montréal, Edmonton, St. John’s, Regina, and Calgary. We ought to be asking why.
I was downloading some data for a housing project I’m working on, and I stumbled across a Census data set on family characteristics of young adults in private households for the population aged 20 to 34, which includes data from the 2001, 2006, 2011, and 2016 censuses.
I thought it would be interesting to see how the proportion of 25–34 year-olds living with a parent progressed over time. I decided to exclude 20–24-year-olds, since a large proportion of them would be in college or university.
After a bit of magic with Excel, I calculated the proportion of 25–34-year-olds living with a parent in the 25 metro areas (specifically census metropolitan areas) with the largest populations of 25–34-year-olds.
Without further ado, here’s the data, sorted by CMA with the highest proportion of 25–34-year-olds living with a parent in 2001.
Here are a few graphs comparing Ontario communities to similar-sized ones in other provinces.
Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo (Orange) vs. Edmonton (Blue)
London (Orange) vs. Québec (Blue)
Windsor (Orange) vs. St. John’s (Blue)
Barrie (Orange) vs. Regina (Blue)
Guelph (Orange) vs. Montréal (Blue)
Kingston (Orange) vs. Halifax (Blue)
Ottawa-Gatineau (Orange) vs. Calgary (Blue)
And… finally… Hamilton (Orange) vs. Vancouver (Blue)
I’m looking forward to the release of the 2021 Census data, to see how these trends evolved over the past five years.
