VANCOUVER—Meagan Dyer moved to Vancouver from Nanaimo five years ago. The 29-year old thought she would be getting ready to buy her first home by now.

But soaring housing prices in the past few years has made home ownership seem impossibly out of reach, the book editor said.

“It’s not even something I can aspire to doing.”

Dyer pays $850 for a one-bedroom basement suite in South Vancouver.

More than two-thirds of Canadian households own their home, according to 2016 Statistics Canada data. But in Vancouver, where home ownership is out of reach for many, 53 per cent of households rent.

That discrepancy can create feelings of resentment among people who rent because owning a home is still tied with ideas of success and family, said UBC demographer Nathanael Lauster.

“There are a lot of reinforcements both from what people see around them and popular culture at large that if you are renting, you are kind-of a failure,” he said.

“You think of [renting] as a temporary thing – that you’re not yet an adult,” said Lauster, who authored a book about Vancouverites’ housing expectations called the Death and Life of the Single Family House.

A Vancouver-based property management company wants to celebrate the idea of renting long-term with a social media campaign that encourages renters to post about the benefits of renting.

“We want to de-stigmatize [renting] and take away any negative connotations that it may be attached to,” said Olivia Brown, spokesperson for Hollyburn Properties.

Benefits of renting include being able to move cities at a moments notice and not having to deal with maintenance costs like fixing the dishwasher, added Colleen Reyes, the company’s marketing manager.

It is unlikely home ownership will stop being a goal for the majority of Canadians, but it is possible that ideal could fade in extraordinarily expensive housing markets like Vancouver, said Lauster.

“The barriers to entry could become large enough that people really don’t feel like home ownership is a normal thing.”

It’s a shift in mindset that many young Vancouverites are grappling with, because their parents did not encounter the same challenges. Seven in ten baby boomers in Vancouver own a home, according to a recent poll from Royal LePage. If the current gap between household income and home prices continues, it is unlikely millennials will achieve that same rate of home ownership.

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According to census data, the percentage of renters in the Vancouver area is growing.

In 2011, renters made up 34.5 per cent of households in Metro Vancouver. In 2016, that number jumped to 36.3 per cent.

Lauster described the change as a “sizable” bump when compared with other Canadian cities.

But Dyer may not stick around as a renter in Vancouver for much longer. She is considering moving back to Vancouver Island, not only because she can’t afford to buy a home in Vancouver, but also because even finding stable rental housing has proved difficult.

She has been forced to move two times in the past five years of living in the Lower Mainland.

Many purpose-built rental buildings, which generally offer more stable housing, have long waiting lists. Reyes confirmed Hollyburn is seeing an increase in applications for its 55 rental buildings in Metro Vancouver.

The vacancy rate for the Vancouver area has been below one per cent for several years. But developers are starting to build more rental housing to meet the growing demand.

According to a July report by the Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation, almost 3,890 units of rental housing have been built in Metro Vancouver so far this year. That’s about 35 per cent more than the same time period in 2017.

The housing agency’s definition of rental housing includes laneway houses, secondary suites, and purpose-built rentals.

Hollyburn Properties manages over 3,200 purpose-built rental units in the Metro Vancouver area. The company’s main business strategy in the past was to acquire purpose-built rentals and manage them.

But in recent years, it has waded into the developer world. In 2016, Hollyburn finished construction on a 130-unit rental housing building in North Vancouver and it has broken ground on a 144-unit project, also in North Vancouver, that is slated for completion in 2020.

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