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 2011 data and the map based on 2021 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. 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: CA16