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.

I’ve written quite a few posts about family formation and, more specifically, about where Millennials will move once they start having kids. 

Many seem to believe that – despite the current Millennial love affair with urban centers – much of this cohort is destined to repeat the pattern of the previous generation. Meaning, once the kids come along, they’re headed to the suburbs in search of bigger and more affordable housing.

If you look at the data, there’s a lot to support this prediction. Below is an interesting chart from Nathanael Lauster (Professor in Sociology at the University of British Columbia) that looks at net migration by age group for the City of Vancouver and the metro area.

What this chart shows is a flood of people in their late teens and early 20s migrating into the city (many of which are likely students), but then a fairly dramatic net loss of people leaving the city as they enter their 30s. The metro area, however, continues to grow – almost certainly because of people looking for more suitable family housing.

But this data is from 2006-2011. We don’t yet have the 2016 census data. And I suspect that we will start to see an increase in the number of people opting to remain in the city across many different urban centers. 

There are some very real economic pressures that successful cities today have to contend with. But I believe that the desire to remain in the city is there for a lot of young people.