This map shows the percentage of dwellings that are "not occupied by usual residents". That includes dwellings that are unoccupied, or occupied temporarily be a person with primary residence elsewhere in Canada or abroad. In plain language, these are residential units not used as primary residence.

The census counts people only once, so people living temporarily in a dwelling unit for work or going to school/university but returning to their parent's home at the end of the semester will not be counted at their current but only their "usual residence". A dwelling unit is counted as "occupied by usual residents" if at least one person living at the dwelling has their "usual residence" in that dwelling unit.

It is a point-in-time metric for Census Day. Units not used as primary residence includes moving vacancies like units for sale or rent and not currently lived in and units recently rented or bought and not moved in yet. In particular this can be seen when larger buildings complete close to census day. It also includes units under renovation. Another large source of dwellings not occupied by usual residents is secondary suites, which owners may absorb back into the main unit for their own use. Secondary suites are the most "unoccupied" form of housing in many of Canada's larger cities.

This metric also captures longer term vacancies, for example units that are only used occasionally for recreational use, units used for short term rental, or units held vacant for other reasons.

Canada does not collect information on reasons for why a dwelling unit may be vacant, but a comparison to US ACS data that does collect such information can provide context help interpret this metric.

See this post for more information on dwellings not occupied by usual residents, and how they relate to problematic vacancies.

In Canada overall, the rate of unoccupied dwellings slightly increased from 8.4% in 2006 to 8.6% in 2011, 8.6% in 2016, decreasing to 8% in 2021.

When comparing different areas one should keep in mind that the rate of unoccupied dwellings depends heavily on the building stock in each area, with for example apartments generally more likely to be unoccupied than single detached dwellings. So comparisons across areas with different building mix can be challenging, and the building mix also changes over time. 2021 building type data is not yet available.

Comparisons of this metric across time is confounded by changes in census methods in how they discover secondary suites and need careful analysis to be meaningful.

In the City of Vancouver the overall rate of unoccupied dwellings rose from 7.5% in 2006 to 7.5% in 2011 to 8.2% in 2016, and dropped to 7% in 2021. We can observe that areas with high proportion of recent dwelling completions tend to have higher numbers of unoccupied units as it takes time for people to move in.

Compare this to the corresponding maps based on 2016 data based on 2011 data and based on 2006 data.

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