Empty bedrooms

This map gives a lower bound on the percentage of empty bedrooms in each area. It assumes an idealized view that couples share a bedroom and everyone else sleeps in a separate room. For details on how this is estimated see the bottom. This map is meant as a complement to the map of overcrowded dwellings in that it helps identify underused housing. Generally it will undercount the actual ratio of empty bedrooms. From the map of overcrowded dwellings we know for sure that there are households with more than one person per bedroom, not counting couples. This means invariably that there are more empty bedrooms than we show on the map, as we only map the average bedroom need, that is the need if all people were distributed over all bedrooms in each area. Overall in Canada at least 31.1% of bedrooms sit empty. Vancouver has 18% of bedrooms empty, with empty bedrooms spiking on the West Side, and some ares in and around Downtown, South Cambie and along the Skytrain line into Burnaby and large parts of Surrey showing a bedroom deficit by this measure. Toronto comes in a little lower with 16.6% of it's bedrooms sitting empty, Montreal's empty bedroom rate is on par with Vancouver's at 18.1%. Calgary has a much higher rate of empty bedrooms with at least 31.6% sitting empty. It is not surprising that areas with ratios greater than 1, that is more people modulo couples per bedroom in the area, correspond strongly with areas exhibiting high ratios of overcrowded households. Technical details The map shows the ratio of people in private households minus the number of married or common law couples in each household and divides it by the estimated number of bedrooms in each area. We only count bedrooms in occupied buildings. The census does not split out the number of bedrooms per dwelling beyond 4, so we are undercounting bedrooms if a dwelling unit has more then 4. We count studio apartments that don't have a separate bedroom as one bedroom units.

Author: CensusMapper Team

Dataset: CA11F, CA11N