Empty Bedrooms
This map gives a lower bound on the percentage of empty bedrooms in occupied dwellings 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. Compare this to the corresponding map based on 2016 data and the map based on 2011 data. 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. Empty bedrooms and "crowded" housing offer two distinct perspectives into the Canadian housing experience. On one hand, Canada is a rich nation and many people expect to be able to have the luxury of an extra bedroom, to use as extra space, for guests, work from home or flex space, or simply to enable them to grow their family without feeling they have to move. On the other hand, households increasingly lose the luxury of having empty bedrooms. In 2016 this metric estimated around 32.1% of bedrooms in occupied housing to be empty, which dropped to 31.5% in 2021. At the same time, a large portion of Canadians still do enjoy one or more extra bedrooms, while other households are "crowded", highlighting the inequality in housing outcomes. 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 than 4. We count studio apartments that don't have a separate bedroom as one bedroom units.
Author: CensusMapper Team
Dataset: CA21