Expensive housing is making young people in Canada’s two largest cities miserable.

Most young people in Vancouver describe their experiences with housing and commuting in the city as “uncomfortable” or even “miserable”, according to a poll released Monday by the Angus Reid Institute.

These findings are based on a “pain index” that the organization created in 2015, when it released a housing report on Metro Vancouver. The index was developed to measure how well residents were coping with the city’s living conditions, and divides respondents into four categories: happy, comfortable, uncomfortable, and miserable.

The 2018 numbers are more or less the same as the 2015 numbers, deviating only within a five-percentage point range for Vancouver. However, in Toronto, the numbers got considerably worse (more on that later).

In Vancouver, the percentage of people who responded positively on the one hand (happy or comfortable), and negatively on the other hand (uncomfortable or miserable), are pretty much evenly split in the 2018 poll. But, there was a clear tendency for older people to fall into a positive category — and for younger people to fall into a negative one.

In Vancouver, most of the people who reported being happy (16%) or comfortable (35%) with their housing and commuting circumstances were older, Angus Reid found: 65% of those who said they were happy were aged 55+, while over three quarters of respondents who reported being comfortable were 35 or older.

These respondents tend to be homeowners, with the majority owning detached houses. Most of the people in the “happy” category bought their homes more than 25 years ago, are without mortgages, and did not have to commute because they were no longer working.

In contrast, the people who ranked negatively on the pain index were generally under the age of 35, and were divided between owning a home, renting, or living in another arrangement. Those who owned said they have high mortgage payments that were hard to keep up with. In general, the negative respondents relied on public transportation to get around.

Things aren’t looking much better in Canada’s second-most expensive housing market, either. About half of Toronto residents said that they felt negatively about their housing and commuting circumstances — perhaps even more so than Vancouver residents.

“Driven primarily by their propensity to use transit more often, and the likelihood of having a commute of one hour or more, the GTA population skews slightly more Miserable than Vancouver,” Angus Reid said.

In 2015, 17% of Toronto residents reported being “miserable.” That number went up to 27% in 2018.

This high cost of living is driving young people out of the two cities, said Angus Reid, which cited a Statistics Canada report about millennials leaving Canada’s major cities at a higher rate than in previous years.

“More than half of the Uncomfortable say they are giving serious thought to leave Metro Vancouver, while that number rises to eight-in-ten (81%) among the Miserable,” the Angus Reid poll said. “In 2015, 85 per cent of the Miserable group said the same.”

Eight-in-ten of the polled renters agreed that housing prices were “unreasonably high”. And even while many local homeowners actually stand to benefit from Vancouver’s housing bubble since it’s raised the value of their homes, the majority of the city’s residents (62%) want to see prices fall. One-in-four residents want prices to fall by 10% — but 36% of respondents said that they’d like to see prices fall even more, by 30%.

Toronto residents seem to have made a little more peace with home prices. Compared to Vancouver’s staggering majority, only 32% of homeowners in the GTA believe that home prices in their communities qualify as “unreasonable.” Meanwhile, 46% of renters believe this of their rents.