Condo craze
Soaring house prices, shifting lifestyles driving condo craze, experts say
Janis Isaman makes no apologies for raising her six-year-old son in a two-bedroom condominium — and for eschewing the once-coveted trappings of a life in the suburbs.
“I definitely do not want a yard and I do not want anything to do with the suburban lifestyle,” says Isaman, 40, a business owner and single mother in Calgary.
The variety of urban life suits Isaman and her son, she says. They can walk to their favourite tea shops, restaurants and the local library. And the time that would otherwise be taken up cutting grass and raking leaves can instead be spent exploring the city together.
“We have a way more abundant lifestyle because I’m not shovelling the walk, I’m not taking care of the yard.”
Isaman is part of a growing contingent of Canadian families opting for the compact condo lifestyle over the white picket fence and the sprawling suburban McMansion as space runs out in Canada’s biggest cities and housing prices remain out of reach for many.
Wednesday’s latest tranche of census numbers doesn’t delve into the specific phenomenon of condo ownership or house prices; that’s for a later release scheduled for October. But it does illustrate a waning appetite for single-family dwellings among the millions of Canadians living in the country’s largest cities, many of whom are favouring the highrise life.
Toronto and its ever-morphing Tetris skyline has the highest share of dwellings — nearly 30 per cent — in buildings of five or more storeys, Statistics Canada reports, followed by London, Ont., at 16.8 per cent, and Vancouver, at 16.7 per cent.
In 10 of Canada’s 35 so-called “census metropolitan areas,” “single-detached houses represented less than half of occupied private dwellings in 2016,” the agency reported, including in Vancouver. Indeed, in B.C., the share of single-detached houses fell from more than 60 per cent in the 1980s to just 44.1 per cent in 2016.