The Housing Market Isn’t for Single People

There’s a running joke in one of my friend circles that, if we ever pooled our resources and lived together, we’d need a cat room. We daydream about what our space would be like beyond feline accommodations: Everyone would have their own bedroom with en suite bathroom, naturally. We’d have a communal kitchen and living space, so we could hang out and get some friend time in. We’d have a housekeeper come in once a week, and as we get older, maybe a nurse to check in on us. It’s a great dream, and I think we’re half serious about living together, especially because half of us still rent. As my friend Diane once said, “As soon as I think I’ve saved enough for a down payment, prices jump.”

Housing is undeniably one of the major questions of our time. In Canada, not only is home ownership out of reach for many people, but even paying rent is getting harder. A 2024 Abacus survey showed nearly three in five Canadians are somewhat or very concerned about losing their home or rental because of financial issues. And that precarity is even more pronounced for single people.

The old rule of thumb was that housing should be 30 percent of your net income. At 40 percent, the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) considers a household “overburdened.” Overburdened is starting to look like the new normal.

In 2025, when I wrote this, surveys found that some Canadians were spending way more than 30 percent of their income on a place to live. The median gross income for single people was $45,069, and 30 percent of that is $13,521, or $1,125 per month. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Canada, in January 2025, was $2,109, almost double the 30 percent guideline for a median income Canadian. The average monthly mortgage payment in 2024, according to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, ranged between $1,337 in New Brunswick and $2,836 in British Columbia. In the United States, the average monthly mortgage payment in 2024 was $2,209 (US). California has the highest monthly payments at $2,500 (US), compared to West Virginia’s $960 (US).

But where did this 30 percent guideline even come from? I asked Carolyn Whitzman, a housing and social policy consultant who has worked as an expert adviser to the University of British Columbia’s Housing Assessment Resource Tools project, which developed standardized best practices for analyzing housing needs using detailed, open data. When we spoke, she worked as a senior housing researcher at University of Toronto’s School of Cities, researching best practices to scale affordable “missing middle,” modular, and replicable housing.

“It’s both arbitrary and standard,” she said. The standard part of the housing costs calculator was set by the OECD in the 1980s, and Canada has used it since. Other countries, such as the US, the United Kingdom, and Australia, also follow this guideline.

“Back in the early days of labour rights, there was a notion of eight hours for rest, eight hours for work, and eight hours for what you will. Out of that same era, there was advocacy for one day’s work for one week’s rent, which means 20 percent, not 30 percent. And when Canada started doing housing policy, for instance, there’s a report called the Curtis Report on postwar reconstruction that came out in 1944. They used 20 percent as their standard of affordability, which slowly crept up to first 25 percent and then 30 percent. Quebec still uses 25 percent as its definition of affordability.”

The Curtis Report was produced by a committee set up to analyze and manage possible problems of postwar reconstruction, policies, and programs. It used income category measures, a clear definition of affordability based on proportion of household income, as well as a housing need assessment method that included both “accumulated needs” and future “needs arising from population growth and [affordable housing] replacement.” It recommended one-third of new construction be nonprofit public housing, one-third regulated rental, and one-third private market home ownership.

But the federal government decided to, instead, let the market decide. They put policies in place that would increase home ownership rates but ignored low-income households.

Whitzman pointed out that we’re still operating under cultural assumptions that have been in place for decades. One of those ideas is that owning a home is a pathway to creating wealth. “What started happening is that our finance ministers were really worried about pensions and people living longer,” she said. “So, they thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if their home was their pension fund? What if everyone, except for these failures, owned a home and, [w]hen they sold the home, they made a profit?’” She points out that life expectancy used to be shorter, and these days, people are living well into their eighties. In fact, if you’re in your seventies, you have a 25 percent chance of living into your nineties, according to actuaries.

We’re not keeping up with demographic trends in other ways either. Whitzman said that a lot of our housing policy is still locked in “the identification of a normal family that’s going to do certain things and die at certain times and not get divorced. And it’s just so absurd.” She points out that demographics are completely different now, and those housing policies are still locked in assumptions from another century when people were expected to get married and have children in their twenties.

I was very, very lucky when I bought my condo. It was early 2009, right after the 2008 financial crisis started and just before prices in Toronto started climbing. I took out $12,500 from my retirement account through the Home Buyers’ Plan, which was less than the 20 percent needed for a down payment. I was making about $76,000 a year as a senior lifestyle editor and qualified for a $250,000 mortgage. (Those were the days.) What helped me afford my place through years of layoffs and freelance work was the purchase price and nearly seventeen years of ridiculously low interest rates. It was good timing that had very little to do with financial planning on my end.

Recently, I was doing my monthly troll through real estate websites, looking at condos, and I came to the realization that I am priced out of my own neighbourhood. If I sold my place, I could afford a smaller, less well-built condo if I wanted to stay where I am. Or I could move out of the city, get a roommate, or move to a less-expensive province. I could move back in with my parents or move in with my brother and sister-in-law. I love my family, but none of those options are appealing right now, or ever.

And just because I own doesn’t mean I’m secure. I live in an area designated for high-density housing, all those fifty-story condos. Rumours abound that developers have had their eyes on my building for a while, so there is a lingering wait-and-see hope that an eventual offer would be sweet enough to convince the majority of homeowners in my building to sell. I imagine being close to retirement (lol) when we’d get an offer that’s too good to refuse, and I have to find housing right at the time when I would rather not.

I’m one of the few people in my friend group of Gen Xers and elder millennials who owns, and I had a bit of help from my family. The rest of us rent. None of us want anything big. A little bit of outdoor space would be nice, as we all learned during the pandemic that being able to literally touch grass is good for mental health. Not worrying about whether your landlord will raise your rent (beyond the yearly increase) or renovict you is great for mental health. Partners with dual incomes likely split their housing costs, whether mortgage payments or monthly rent, but we singles pay for that on our own, along with everything from utilities to condo maintenance, insurance, and repair costs.

For single Canadians, home ownership has become increasingly out of reach. In 2024, you needed a household income of $137,000 to buy a condo in Toronto and $195,420 to buy a single-family detached home. In Vancouver, you’d need an income of $214,460 to afford an average-priced home. The average income in Canada is $57,100, so you can do the math.

Even for renters, carrying housing costs solo is difficult. The average rent in Canada, in 2024, was $2,185, and in the big cities, like Toronto, Vancouver, Burnaby, and Mississauga, rents were higher. Smaller cities had lower rents, but salaries were also generally lower, and they also saw more people moving in who were looking for cheaper rents, which increased those rents. This is why it’s vital to maintain strong rent control—which generally limits the frequency and extent of rent increases. Rent control exists, in some form, in all Canadian provinces and territories, though in the US, thirty-seven states outright prohibit it. If there aren’t limits on landlords, tenants—especially single tenants—are even more vulnerable, and prices are primed to climb even more quickly.

Jo Pavlov, an education worker from Hamilton, Ontario, rents a two-bedroom place and said that housing costs are one of the biggest expenses of being single. They told me a few years ago, “I started [renting my current house] with a friend, and we split the bills down the middle. When she left, all responsibilities fell to me, and it’s more than I can afford.” Pavlov estimated that paying for all housing costs alone, including bills, ate up over 60 percent of their net income. Since speaking to Pavlov, they have found another roommate and got a raise, but they still don’t think they can carry the rental cost of their apartment for an extended period.

Some people are fine with getting a roommate, but what if you’re not? Maybe you are fifty, sixty, sixty-five, or seventy, and you want your own space to do your own thing. Maybe you have kids, so you already have roommates and don’t want another random adult around. Needing a roommate should not be the default for owning or renting. “I mean, it is an option. I think most of us have had roommates during our college years,” said financial journalist David Aston. “You know, being able to live independently on one’s own without a roommate is certainly something most people would aspire to because roommates are complicated. Usually, people get to a certain stage of life, and they like their independence.”

My friend Celia and I rented a good-sized apartment in Toronto’s Davisville neighbourhood for nearly five years. It was about 900 square feet, which was perfect for two tall women and a cat. The apartment had two bedrooms: one was a whole square foot bigger than the other, so Celia got that, and her cat got the extra square foot . . . and the rest of the apartment, including the bathroom and my bedroom, sometimes. The apartment was right on the subway line, everything except cable and phone was included, and we paid—wait for it—$1,100 when we moved in together and $1,400 when we moved out. Total. That included utilities.

When we decided to look for condos to buy, we originally talked about pooling our mortgage approvals and finding a two-bedroom place for us and future cats. We found an agent and started looking. (The cat stayed home.) We wanted to stay in the city, as we both worked in it and didn’t own cars. And there were two-bedroom condos, but the rooms weren’t the same size. One would be the average size of a condo bedroom (ten by twelve feet) while the other would be a den, which, no, real estate agents—if it doesn’t have a door, it’s not a room. I don’t care what your fish-eye lens photographs say. It’s a large nook. Eventually, we became dissatisfied with what we were seeing.

We talked and realized that, while we were friends, there were small things that irritated us about each other. Celia didn’t like the fact I delayed doing dishes until I absolutely had to (I still do this, which is why a dishwasher was on my must-have list), and I wasn’t a huge fan of cat hair everywhere. Cats, yes. Cat hair, not so much. I shed enough. So, we ended up buying our own places, and we’re still friends.

We may not have become co-owners, but other people are making it work. In Toronto, six people, ranging from their late twenties to late thirties, made headlines by pooling their money to buy a $1.3-million house together downtown. There were no couples or family members among the six. Just friends. They named the house Clarens Commons and secured a co-ownership mortgage, which may have been the first in the country from a big bank.

I spoke with Valery Navarrete, one of the original owners and residents of Clarens Commons, about how they made it work. Prior to Clarens Commons, she had lived alone and with a partner, and now her goal was to live in a stable community rather than buy a house as a financial investment. “We’re very much coming from the housing-as-a-human-right kind of perspective,” she said. “We were just seeing friend after friend find a place, be happy to stay for a while, and then get renovicted.”

While the goal was to create a community, Navarrete said they did their due diligence around finances. “When you’re co-owners and you’re all on the lease, you are all individually responsible if, suddenly, your other co-owners don’t meet their commitment. So, we did look into that, but primarily for us, we were looking for the experience of living in community, which is one of really intermingling our lives together and relying on each other and having fun together.”

The co-owners not only hammered out the tangible financial responsibilities but they also talked about the intangibles. They created a spreadsheet where they each individually filled in their fiscal information and then talked together about it. “We dubbed it financial nudity,” she said. “It was equal parts ‘What’s your income and what are your expenditures?’ and ‘How did your family treat money? How did you grow up? What are your current views on money? Have they changed?’” She said that they did, later, have conversations about a renovation, budgets, and how people felt about the idea of borrowing more money.

While it was difficult to find an institution that had a formal mortgage offering for more than four people on it, Navarrete said that’s changing: “Since then, we’ve realized that with a lot of banks, if you have a relationship, and you go and talk to them, they can make it happen.”

They ran into the same issue when looking for home insurance, and again, it was relationships that helped them get insurance. They had to pay a slightly higher premium than a couple likely would have, but they were satisfied securing insurance so they could get the mortgage. Still, this kind of trailblazing wasn’t all angst and stress. “There were some really humorous moments as well,” she said. “We were with the lawyers who handled the transfer, and we were filling out forms, and there wasn’t enough room for all of our names.”

While not all single people are lonely (there’s a big difference between solitude and loneliness), social isolation and loneliness are recognized by the World Health Organization as a priority public health problem and policy issue across all age groups, and thoughtful co-living could be one way to help address that. The joy of this kind of arrangement is that you can seek companionship when you want and retreat to your own space when you need to relax and recharge.

Navarrete moved out due to a change in her personal life circumstances, but she would absolutely do it again. She said that, once her child is an adult, she and her partner would move back into a house like Clarens Commons. “In those five years of living on my own, I think I had done quite a good job of it. I had a lot of friendships; I had a busy work, volunteer, and social life. I could fill what would have been solo time with hangouts with friends, and I felt really full in terms of my sense of community and connection. But it was a lot of work to just coordinate all of that. I would have a Sunday to myself, and I would go do my groceries and get organized for the week ahead and cook some food, and I would go, ‘Oh, you know what? It would be really nice to eat with someone, but who’s around?’ That was my desire, with co-owning and co-living, to have more built-in connection.”

Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from The Singles Tax: No-Nonsense Financial Advice for Solo Earners by Renée Sylvestre-Williams, published by ECW Press, 2026.

Renée Sylvestre-Williams is a finance journalist, editor of the newsletter The Budgette, and author of the upcoming book The Singles Tax, publishing in 2026.