The Globe and Mail reports in its Wednesday edition that the belief that real estate is the greatest way to generate wealth has given us a housing market in which only one in three households can afford a property. The Globe's Rob Carrick writes that rising prices mean more wealth for current owners that they can share with family and less affordability for those trying to get into the market. A crucial spring in Canadian real estate history is about to begin. If the green shoots of a recovery we have seen so far keep growing, some of today's renters may permanently be excluded from home ownership. Worse, the high cost of rent poses the risk they will never save enough to compete with the wealth of owners. A recent report on renters from RBC Economics lays out the problem for the housing market. It says that 68 per cent of all Canadian households cannot afford to buy a home based on their earned incomes alone, and that includes some who already own. The RBC report says the economic upheaval of the past few years has left renters in much worse financial shape than owners of property. This threatens the ability of renters to build wealth and thus could worsen the kind of economic inequality we are increasingly seeing.