Jens von Bergmann (data analyst and mathematician); Nathanael Lauster (sociologist); and Douglas Harris (law professor) have been working since 2018 on a study of how condominiums are used and occupied across Canada. The goal is to use the results to better inform public and academic debate.

They recently presented some of their early findings at the National Housing Conference in Ottawa and have since made that information public. It is still a work in progress, but already there are some interesting takeaways. To start, here is a chart showing occupied housing units in Canada and in select CMAs:

Not surprisingly, Canada is broadly speaking a nation of single-detached houses. But in our three largest cities -- Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver -- apartments/condominiums are doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

Vancouver has the highest proportion of condominiums. It is a geographically constrained metro area and it is one of the first cities in the country to adopt condominiums as a housing tenure. And in Montreal, there are more apartments under 5 storeys than there are single-detached houses. Not surprising. There's no "missing middle" in this city.

But the really interesting question is, how are these condominiums being used and occupied? It's a challenging question to answer, which is why it's so often debated, but here's what the researchers have found so far:

The owner and renter categories are self-explanatory. Temporary, which is the least common type of tenure, is where the owner has declared their principal residence as being somewhere else. In other words, the condominium is a second home.

The vacant category is effectively that city's condominium rental vacancy rate. These are condominium units which are empty, but that are at the same time listed for rent. There are relatively few of these. In Toronto and Vancouver they're virtually non-existent in this dataset (2016).

Finally, we get to unoccupied units. This one is tricky and the researchers aren't exactly clear on what is driving this number. They chalk it up, at least partially, to the flexible nature of condominiums. For example, it could be empty because the unit is switching from owner-occupied to rental, or vice versa.

That said, it is very interesting to note that Toronto and Vancouver actually have the lowest percentage of unoccupied condominium units. This may be surprising to some of you given the public discourse around investor units in these two cities.

Generally, they found that in Canada's three largest metro areas, the following rule of thumb seems to apply: For every 10 condominium units built, 6 will become owner-occupied, 3 will enter the rental stock, and 1 will go unoccupied. Does that seem right to you?

If you'd like to dig into the methodology that the researchers used, you can do that over here at Mountain Doodles. All of the charts and data used in this post were taken from there.

Last night when I was thumbing through Twitter before bed, I came across this blog post describing Vancouver’s land use types. The blog itself is called Mountain Doodles, but it’s not exactly clear who the author is. 

In any event, what she/he did was analyze Vancouver’s land use dataset to come up with a series of charts that break down the percentage of each type: residential single detached, residential low-rise apartment, commercial, green space, and so on.

Here’s what the chart looks like for Metro Vancouver:

And here’s what it looks like for just the City of Vancouver, proper:

When you look at the metro area, green / open space dominates. Although, the author states that, given the dataset, there could be a small overstatement of green space. There’s also the question of where the overall boundary was drawn.

When you look at only the City of Vancouver, it’s land for residential housing (detached and duplex) and roads that dominate, with green / open space coming in a somewhat distant third.

Of course, this does not speak to the intensity in which any of the above land might be used, such as the apartment lands (i.e., the third dimension). But from a two-dimensional perspective, you certainly get a sense of what we – for better or for worse – have chosen to privilege.