Can't Afford to have families?

Ottawa: fewer young families, a widening affordability gap

Two trends, tracked over time, using figures already on the public record.

OCDSB elementary enrolment shortfall vs. projection

Each fall, the school board projects enrolment; each fall since 2020 it has come in below that projection. The gap reflects fewer young children in Ottawa households than the board's own demographic models expected.

OCDSB elementary shortfall vs projection — 2020: 1700 fewer, 2023: 1600 fewer, 2024: 1130 fewer (incl. 750 fewer kindergarten)

The 2024 gap was concentrated in kindergarten — 750 of the 1,130 missing students were kindergarten-age, the cohort born in the years rent rose fastest.

Source: CBC News reporting on OCDSB board figures, 2020–2025.

Rent vs. household income, indexed to 2014

Both lines start at the same point in 2014. The distance between them by 2024 is the affordability gap driving the enrolment numbers above.

Ottawa, indexed to 2014=100 — Median rent: 2014: 100, 2024: 160 (+60%). Household income: 2014: 100, 2024: 146 (+46%).

Affordable housing wait list, a separate measure: up 67% since 2020, now over 15,000 households, with an average wait of up to 7.6 years.

Source: City of Ottawa 2025 Housing Needs Assessment.

How long before this becomes a haves and have-nots divide?

Some of it is already visible. Some is baked in but not showing yet. Some won't hit for a generation — and by then it stops being fixable with housing policy alone.

0–2 years — already showing

The classroom is the first place it appears

The OCDSB kindergarten shortfall isn't a forecast — it's 2024's actual enrolment. Homeowners are still having kids at roughly normal rates (rising home equity even nudges this up). Renters are the ones deferring. The divide isn't coming. It's already sitting in the enrolment numbers.

5–10 years — the sorting hardens

Delay turns into fewer kids, not just later kids

Right now most of the gap is timing — 32 instead of 27 — which is still individually recoverable. But delay compounds: each year shrinks the fertile window and raises the odds of stopping at one child instead of two or three.

This is also when the shortfall moves from elementary into high school, so the fiscal pain shifts from kindergarten classes to program and school closures.

10–15 years — labour market and tax base

The missing cohort was supposed to be the workforce

The renter households who didn't form families in the 2020s were the working-age cohort employers needed in the mid-2030s. A thinner local youth cohort plus an aging homeowner class means fewer prime-working-age taxpayers supporting more retirees — concentrated by ward, not spread evenly.

15–25 years — the wealth transfer locks it in

This is the part that makes it permanent

Owners' kids inherit a paid-off Ottawa property around 2040–2050 and can buy in even on a modest income. Renters' kids inherit nothing and face the same locked-out entry point their parents did — likely worse. This is the mechanism that turns a temporary affordability squeeze into a permanent divide: it stops being about income and starts being about which household you were born into.

The window that actually matters

Everything policy can touch — rental supply, tenure security, missing-middle housing that lets renters build equity sooner — has to happen in the 5–10 year window. After the property-wealth gap calcifies into inheritance, no municipal housing policy reaches back and fixes it. This isn't a slow-burn issue with decades of runway. It's a 5–10 year window before the divide stops being about affordability and starts being about who your parents were.

Stage 1 is grounded in OCDSB enrolment reporting and the City of Ottawa 2025 Housing Needs Assessment. Stages 2–4 project forward from established fertility research (Dettling & Kearney 2014; Clark 2012) on the tenure-based homeowner/renter split in housing-price effects on family formation.