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Owners aren't happier than renters
The happiness gap
Owned homes tend to be a little nicer and better maintained, and they tend to sit in better neighborhoods. Compare owners and renters without accounting for that, and renters come out a bit less happy. Statistics Canada has a study that reports life satisfaction both ways, controlled and uncontrolled.
A professional choosing between buying a house in a nice neighborhood and renting one there is unlikely to be happier in either case. Someone forced to rent in a rough neighborhood because it is all they can afford may be less happy, though the renting is not necessarily the cause.
When owning fits
A person who has thought hard about their own life and found that owning a home gave them a profound psychological lift has a real reason to own. It holds for that person and does not hold for everybody.
Why do controls erase the happiness gap?
Owners differ from renters in ways that affect happiness on their own: they tend to be older, wealthier, and more likely to be married. Researchers handle this by comparing people who are alike on those traits, using statistical controls. Without them, a difference attributed to owning may belong to income or age. Economists call this problem selection, because the people who end up owning are not a random sample.
How do surveys measure life satisfaction?
Statistics Canada's General Social Survey asks respondents to rate how they feel about life as a whole on a scale from 0 to 10. The World Happiness Report, based on Gallup polling, uses a similar 0 to 10 measure known as the Cantril ladder. The ladder is named for the pollster Hadley Cantril, who developed it in the early 1960s.
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