Housing affordability is increasingly shaping how young people think about politics, political parties, and the future of democracy.
On this episode of DemograFix, Mike Moffatt and Cara Stern explore what research tells us about the relationship between the housing crisis and young people’s political views across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
Does declining housing affordability deepen the divide between younger and older voters? Is it pushing young people away from centrist parties, or toward the left or right? And what happens when an entire generation loses faith in its ability to ever own a home?
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Cara Stern: Canada isn’t the only country in the world where younger generations are struggling to buy a home or rent an apartment they can afford, as over the past two decades, many countries have seen rents and home prices rise faster than wages.
Mike Moffatt: It’s true. Over the past 20 years, the home price-to-income ratio—one measure of housing unaffordability—rose by over 30% in Sweden, Australia, Norway, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, and a host of other countries. But when it comes to being the worst, Canada was the best, as we had the biggest rise in price-to-income ratios of any high-income country in the world.
Cara Stern: On DemograFix, we’re examining how reduced housing affordability is reshaping the political views of young people across the globe.
Mike Moffatt: Naturally, I worry about what a lack of housing affordability means at the family level—you know, how we’re seeing couples have fewer children, or having to move far away from family and job opportunities in order to find a place to live.
I fear that our lack of attainable housing is going to lead to an ever-increasing number of talented Canadians moving elsewhere. Though that concern is diminished somewhat by the fact that the places they’re likely to move to are also getting more expensive.
Cara Stern: So the big hope for people choosing to stay here is that other places are going to be bad, too, and so maybe it’s relatively okay to stay here.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. That’s not what we should be counting on to retain our talent—having other countries do poorly. Rather, Canada should be doing well at a societal level beyond this migration. I think my biggest concern is what a lack of housing affordability might be doing to our politics in particular. I’m worried that the housing crisis could lead younger voters to understandably lose faith in the system entirely, or go down some pretty dark roads.
Cara Stern: You’re not the only person concerned about that.
The pollster Nik Nanos recently had a piece in Maclean’s discussing the issue both globally and in Canada. He gave a number of worrying examples and noted a 2024 poll that showed that over one-quarter of Canadian adults under the age of 35 either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that violence is sometimes needed to achieve social change.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, and that was a really worrying piece. I’d probably be less concerned about the potential political impacts if we heard politicians talk about this issue more, or if we saw more policy put into place in order to try and help out young people. I also think it’s an issue that academics haven’t studied nearly enough.
Cara Stern: There has to be some research out there, at least, that could maybe link housing affordability issues to changes in political views.
Mike Moffatt: There absolutely is—not as much as I’d like, but it is out there, and what is out there is worth discussing. So let’s do that today. Instead of simply citing a bunch of studies at you, Cara, or at our audience, I think today we’ll try something a little bit different. I’m going to give you six statements related to the intersection of housing and politics in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. I’d like you to tell me if you think the statement, based on the research, is probably true, probably false, or give the Avril Lavigne answer of “it’s complicated”—and I’ll respond with what the current evidence seems to show.
Cara Stern: Sure, let’s do it! Although, can we start with defining what “young people” means?
Mike Moffatt: Fair question. Most of the research cuts it off at age 35, so voters or non-voters between the ages of 18 and 35. Obviously, different research studies will define things differently, but roughly, that’s what we’re talking about: people in their 20s and early 30s.
Cara Stern: Okay, fair.
Mike Moffatt: First statement: Declining housing affordability is likely increasing the political divide between older and younger voters. Is that probably true, probably false, or it’s complicated?
Cara Stern: I would think that’s probably true because it kind of pits people against each other. You can look at how NIMBYism has played out, and a lot of people see it as the incumbents having prevented newcomers to the market from getting in. Usually, that does have a bit of an age divide just because of the birth lottery of when you were able to be in a position to buy your home.
I’m not sure if it’s a real political divide in terms of political parties, because there seems to be mostly consensus on tackling housing affordability—at least in Canada—in a way that doesn’t drop prices too much, or at least as much as the government can control it.
I’m not sure about the rest of the world, but you don’t seem to get too many places with big parties that say, “We’re going to represent the young people who don’t have a home, and we’re willing to do what it takes even if it sacrifices the equity of people who have one.” So I would guess it’s not strictly by political party, but there is a generational divide.
Mike Moffatt: Well, it turns out in polling data across North America, Australia, and Europe, it seems to be likely true. Polls taken over time in a variety of countries show an increasing political divide between older and younger voters. That divide is based on priorities, with younger voters tending to prioritize a different set of issues—housing being an obvious one—than older generations.
I want to make clear that none of that suggests generational divides are anything new. Obviously, there were massive ones in the 1960s, and a generation ago there were divides on issues like climate change and same-sex marriage. But based on the polling data, this old-young divide has increased in relatively rich countries over the past 10 to 15 years. So I would put this one in the “probably true” bucket.
Cara Stern: That makes sense. As wealth inequality has grown, you see middle-class people becoming fairly wealthy on paper—at least because of their home ownership—versus people who don’t have any hope of getting in. That has changed a lot over the last 10 to 15 years, so that makes total sense to me.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, and you raised an interesting question a moment ago when you said, “How is this necessarily manifesting itself in voting behaviour?” It’s one thing to prioritize different issues, but it’s another thing for parties to cater to those issues. So let’s investigate this in statement two:
Declining housing affordability is likely increasing political polarization among young people and reducing their support for mainstream, centrist parties. Is that probably true, probably false, or it’s complicated?
Cara Stern: I think it’s complicated because you can look at the States where there are a lot of people voting for candidates in the Democratic Party who are democratic socialists, holding positions very much outside the status quo of the party. We saw it here with younger Canadians moving to the right and breaking with status quo ideals on things like immigration.
As long as we have a first-past-the-post system, I don’t think it’s necessarily pulling them away from voting for mainstream parties. My guess is they’re more likely to just not vote rather than to vote for a non-mainstream party in a system where there are really only two parties that have a chance of winning—maybe three. In places where there are more political choices to choose from that could actually win, I would suspect people are moving away from the centre and looking for parties that have those “tear it down” solutions.
Mike Moffatt: I would say this one is likely true, though as you point out, geography matters, and it’s also a little bit complicated because sometimes it’s hard to separate what is anti-centrism versus what is anti-incumbency, particularly in countries where centrist parties usually win. But we do see in exit polling data, particularly in Europe, reduced support for centrist parties.
There’s an academic article with a title that I just love called “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: The Social and Political Consequences of Europe’s Housing Crisis.” The article notes how voters under the age of 35 have largely abandoned centrist parties in Europe. Now that same author has another academic article called Three Inconvenient Truths: How to Stop Housing Radicalizing the Young and Killing the Political Centre. Man, does this guy have a talent for titles, because academic articles usually have really boring titles, but those are fantastic! His third inconvenient truth is that the centre—particularly the centre-right’s most important voter group—tends to be older homeowners without a mortgage. That’s who the party caters to. His inconvenient truth is that those parties need to contribute to ensuring a more sustainable economic model for younger generations, or else they’re not going to be able to attract voters across the political spectrum.
Finally, you’re right that we haven’t seen this play out as much in Canada. I suspect—though there isn’t really great research on it—that it’s more of a Trump-effect rally-around-the-flag effect than anything else, or it could have to do with the electoral system.
But in the UK, which has a very similar electoral system, you are seeing an abandonment of the centre from younger voters, who are voting for more extreme or at least less mainstream parties. It’s really hard to tell what’s going on in Canada—how much of it is the Trump effect, or how much is the electoral system—but we don’t seem to be seeing that kind of partisan change as much as in other countries.
Cara Stern: If there are more parties, like in the UK, you see a party like the Reform Party having a chance of actually forming government. If the election were held today, I believe they’re frontrunners or at least neck-and-neck. It’s making parties that were never viable in the past more viable. I am watching their system to see if they change it, given how disproportionate the last election was for them and how different the next one might be depending on which party ends up winning.
Mike Moffatt: I totally agree—something I’ll be watching as well. That’s actually a very nice segue into statement three:
Declining housing affordability is likely causing younger people to increase their support for left-wing parties. Is that probably true, probably false, or it’s complicated?
Cara Stern: I would think this one’s complicated too. Left-wing parties tend to push for more social safety nets, which more people need as wealth inequality grows, so you’d think it would push people to the left. But what we’re seeing more of is an anti-incumbency effect.
In Canada, we’ve had Liberals in power for so long, and for a long time we had a very progressive Liberal government, which pushed people to the right when they wanted to stand against the status quo and see major change in the country.
It took an outsider to pull the party back to the centre to keep them from losing here. So even though the incumbent won, it’s a party with very different priorities than the last one. In other countries, we saw the opposite: if their incumbents were to the right, it moved people against whatever the status quo was in their own country for the most part.
Mike Moffatt: I would put this one under “it’s complicated” as well. A 2021 article in the journal Economy and Space makes it clear that while the housing crisis increases radicalization of younger voters, there doesn’t seem to be any predetermined pattern to which direction people will become more radicalized, particularly at the population level. Sometimes that disproportionately helps parties more on the left, but other times, it helps parties more on the right. In a number of countries, including Portugal, Belgium, and Finland, parties on the far right of the political spectrum out-poll every other party, particularly among men under the age of 35.
There is somewhat of a gender divide here, with younger men more likely to go right and younger women more likely to go left. Those differences are real, but they can also be overstated. Part of this political nexus between younger voters—whether they go left or right—is that there’s also a strong correlation between views on the housing crisis and views on immigration among younger voters, particularly (but not exclusively) younger male voters.
In that piece “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People…” that I cited earlier, it quotes one Dutch voter who says, “I’m really not racist, but...” Whenever a sentence starts that way, it’s never going to end well! But he says, “I’m really not racist, but when it comes to my own country, I think I should get priority access to a house.”
Cara Stern: That’s the kind of thing that a few years ago people would look at and say, “That’s racist.” The culture has changed so much that a lot of people would hear that now and go, “Yeah, maybe that’s reasonable.”
Mike Moffatt: The data bears that out—that has become a more accepted political view. It’s not necessarily the case that a housing crisis turns young voters more left-wing; sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. In part, it really is determined by political actors and which politician can capture the imagination of young voters, rather than an ideological shift.
Cara Stern: Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
Mike Moffatt: Let’s pivot to statement four:
Declining housing affordability is likely causing younger people’s political preferences to be more polarized along economic lines, as affordability issues hit well-off young people differently than less well-off young people. Is that probably true, probably false, or it’s complicated?
Cara Stern: I would say that’s probably true—maybe complicated. In Canada at least, I think that has been true in the last few years, although things like tariffs and Trump’s childish threats to Canada have united people as Canadians in supporting the government, so you see less of a political divide.
But when you zoom in, you see people worrying about how it affects them in different ways depending on whether they make their money off work or off wealth. Globally, you see young people split between those who will inherit property and have access to their parents’ wealth and those who don’t, which makes sense.
My guess would be you’re seeing a split in the younger generation more than in the past few decades, where wealth plays a role as much as or more than age does. The degree to which it plays a role has grown.
Mike Moffatt: The research bears that out, so I would put this under “probably true.” We could say complicated because the research isn’t as robust as we’d like it to be, but there is interesting research out of the UK showing a divide between younger voters. For those who have access to inherited wealth—parents who can help them with a down payment or give them a home—or who have a high income relative to their cost of living and are able to purchase a home, they’re going to have more mainstream political views. They’re not going to want to burn down the system because the system is still working for them, and they don’t necessarily want to see radical changes.
It’s those who have been left behind who want to burn down the system. This is where some of the left-right divide comes in.
When you have a younger voter who’s left behind and thinks, “I can’t possibly ever see an opportunity for me to own a home,” they tend to pivot more left politically. They start to support more redistribution, rent control, and social housing—policies we often associate with the mainstream left, not necessarily the extreme left.
But when it comes to folks who feel like, “I haven’t given up that dream, or I still think it’s possible if we make a number of changes,” they tend to pivot to more right-wing policies: supply-side reforms, first-time homebuyer programs (which can be on the left or the right), lower taxes, and savings incentives.
In essence, there is a divide between the “haves” and “have-nots” when it comes to younger people, and those “have-nots” can be split between supporting left-wing solutions and right-wing solutions.
Cara Stern: Even the people on the right who are looking for supply-side solutions would probably still rather have an economic system that works than one where they have to get help from their parents. But if they see a path forward, they can say, “Okay, well, at least it might work for me, and maybe if we can fix things we can get it back to that”—versus the people who are completely hopeless, have no hope left of being able to own a home, and want to see a lot more redistribution. That makes sense.
Mike Moffatt: A lot of it has to do with identity. You have folks who say, “I’m a forever renter”—sometimes by choice, sometimes by circumstance. That creates different support for a set of policies than for folks who see themselves as potential buyers.
Let’s pivot to statement five:
Declining housing affordability is causing young people to be more disenchanted and disenfranchised from the political system than they were a decade ago. Is that probably true, probably false, or it’s complicated?
Cara Stern: I would say that’s true. In Canada, none of our main parties seem to really want to burn the system down—they’re all variations on the status quo. When you’re locked out entirely, it seems like there’s no one going to bat for you, so it’s very easy to disengage. Voter turnout in Canada has dropped with pretty much every election in the past decade, though I don’t know if that’s entirely because of housing affordability. But we can see turnout has dropped elsewhere too—the UK, for example, had an election with its lowest turnout in the past century.
Historically, buying a home has been a trigger point for people to get more engaged in the political system, because you start to realize how political decisions affect your mortgage rate and property taxes. Without that milestone, there’s less of that moment where people become engaged in the same way.
Mike Moffatt: Current research shows that it’s probably true that there is less engagement. But there’s a really important distinction to make between being less likely to vote and being less politically engaged, because a lot of the engagement we’re seeing from young people takes on different forms than voting. That makes sense: if you believe the system is rigged against you, participating in that system feels like a waste of time, but you might still try to effect change in other ways—through social media, getting like-minded groups together, and so on. So we can’t completely infer disengagement from politics just from disengagement from voting.
Cara Stern: We’ve seen a lot of young people get involved in movements asking for political change. It’s too bad a lot of people feel like it’s not worth showing up to vote, but I can understand how they get there, and I’m glad there are alternative outlets for them to get involved politically, even though voting is still important.
Mike Moffatt: That takes us to our last statement, statement six:
Declining housing affordability has reduced the desire for young people to own a home. Is that probably true, probably false, or it’s complicated?
Cara Stern: That one rings very false to me. I don’t think there’s a decreased desire; I think there are decreased expectations.
A lot of people expect to rent forever at this point—they see homeownership as out of reach, and some have resigned themselves to that reality. But there are a lot of people still hopeful they’ll be able to afford something, even if they don’t think they’ll be able to reach what their parents had. I don’t think there’s any data out there showing that people want it less.
Mike Moffatt: This one is probably false. Poll after poll across countries shows there’s been no meaningful drop in people’s desire to own a home over the last 10 or 20 years.
I find that when we talk with policymakers and politicians, they often confuse desire with expectations. There’s this belief that if younger voters start to believe they’ll never be able to afford a home, they’ll somehow end up desiring it less and be okay with that. Human nature doesn’t work that way.
Both you and I are parents, and we see that with our own kids! If anything, the more you can’t have something, the more you want it. I’ve done that with my kids where I’ll say, “This vegetable is only for grown-ups,” and they’ll say, “No, no, no, I want to try the broccoli!” It’s a little Jedi mind trick parents use because human nature dictates that the more an option is denied to you, the more attractive it looks. Being denied that option breeds resentment.
In my view, politicians are playing with fire if they think younger people will simply get used to the idea that they’ll never have an opportunity to purchase a home, so long as we make renting a pleasant enough experience. To be clear, renting should be a pleasant experience! Renting is a fantastic option and the best choice for a lot of people. You should have a diversity of options to choose from, and right now we are seeing that younger people still want the option to buy a home, but are often denied that option.
Cara Stern: Oh man, I’m worried politicians will listen to this and think, “Oh, the solution to the housing crisis is reverse psychology! Just convince people it’s something they want, do the same thing we do with kids and broccoli—it’ll work great!” I hope that’s not the takeaway from this episode.
Thank you so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin, and this episode was edited by Canadian Civil.
Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about Jedi mind tricks you can use on your children, please leave a comment in our YouTube comments section.
Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.
This is an interesting discussion, but you will forgive me for suggesting that it could have been stronger if it had made more use of the readily available evidence on what young people in Canada think about democracy: https://environicsinstitute.org/support-for-democracy-among-younger-canadians/