Twenty-six-year-old Ian Sinclair has found the perfect basement apartment in the west end. It’s close to transit, with its own entrance. He even gets along well with his landlords, who happen to be his parents.“Essentially I’m their basement tenant but not paying rent,” says Sinclair, who works full-time in the public sector. He moved back into the house he grew up in near Runnymede Station after graduating university in 2017.“I definitely feel fortunate and privileged,” he says of his situation. “I have many friends from school whose parents aren’t from the city so they didn’t have a choice.”As Toronto’s housing crisis continues, experts are seeing a new divide taking hold among the younger generation: those who can live with their parents — and save for a down payment — and those who can’t. Read More: Parents of millennials providing more than financial assistance on home buyingMillennials rank affordable housing among top concerns for upcoming provincial election, real estate study says Toronto-area millennials want their own backyards, report says Across the city almost 35 per cent of Sinclair’s peers aged 20 to 34 live at home, according to 2016 census data. But those rates are higher in wealthier neighbourhoods, such as Runnymede-Bloor West Village (almost 40 per cent). Other affluent areas with lots of larger single family homes also have higher rates of millennials living at home, such as Centennial Scarborough (69 per cent), and Kingsway South in Etobicoke (61 per cent).The highest percentage is found in one of the city’s wealthiest communities, Bridle Path-Sunnybrook-York Mills, where a whopping 75 per cent of young adults are sticking with mom and dad. “I see living with parents as a form of privilege,” says University of Waterloo assistant professor Nancy Worth, who studied the issue in a 2017 report called GenY at Home. Worth said living at ho ...
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