I started thinking about this the other night. For the first 18 years of my life, in other words, up until I moved away to university, I lived for the most part in a detached single-family house in the suburbs of Toronto. But since then, I have almost exclusively lived in apartments/condominiums ranging from converted houses to high-rise buildings.

This was true when I was at the University of Toronto and it was true when I lived in Philadelphia for grad school. In my first year of grad school I lived in a converted house in a questionable area of West Philly. In my second year I lived in a high-rise brutalist building. And in my third year I lived in a small three level walk-up apartment above a pet store and a really great deli. This perhaps not surprising given I was a student.

But since moving back to Toronto, the same has been true. I initially invested and lived in a single-family house, but then decided I preferred living in a condominium and so I have done that ever since. Maybe this changes with kids or maybe it doesn't. But it's interesting to think about the housing types we have chosen or were handed. Location and other factors certainly play a role.

What housing type have you lived in the most throughout your life? Let us know in the comment section below.

Cover photo by Michal GADEK on Unsplash

Here is a chart from a recent Bloomberg article summarizing who owns single-family houses in the US.

As of Q1-2024, about 69% were owner-occupied, about 26.6% were owned by small landlords (1-9 homes), and the rest were owned by what many are now calling "corporate landlords."

The point of this graph was to show that, despite getting a lot of political attention, corporate landlords still own very little. Let's call it sub 4%, excluding iBuying companies like OpenDoor. So how much of a problem is this, really?

Smaller landlords control much more of the US market. And at the end of the day, a house owned by a small landlord versus a corporate landlord doesn't change the supply-demand balance of a market. It still represents an available home.

The first and more important problem to solve is overall housing supply. Because that does change the supply-demand balance of a market. And once again, there's no shortage of data to support the finding that increased supply tends to moderate rental growth.

For the record, I also dislike using the term home to refer to single-family houses. Home is not a housing type. It is simply a place where people live permanently. So whenever I see a title like "US homes," I get confused, because I don't actually know what they're referring to.

If you read the article, it would appear they're only talking about single-family houses. But implying that these are the only kind of home feels to me like an anachronism.