Household Formation in Canada and the United States: Insights Into Differences by Race, Ethnicity, Immigrant Populations, and Country

This study focuses on the fastest changing component of housing demand in the future—the immigrant and minority groups, age 25–84. Using the 2006 and 2016 Canadian censuses and American Community Surveys, we compare headship and homeownership rates of both immigrants and native-born Whites in Canada and the United States. We model the probability of being a renter head, owner head, or nonhousehold head by fitting a multinomial logistic regression, controlling for several individual and contextual variables for both countries. We find that most immigrant groups have had similar patterns of household formation in the two countries and that, whereas immigrants have shown upward mobility in both housing markets, those in Canada have progressed more quickly than in the United States. Further, we find that women are less likely than men to be a household head in both countries, but that the gap is larger in Canada.