From the fifth floor of his College and Dovercourt two-bedroom apartment, Jaco Joubert has a spectacular view of the glittering lights of Toronto’s downtown condos.

He’s often wondered why so many people struggle to find a decent place to live, with so many shiny new towers and cranes in the sky.

That curiosity led him to do his own investigation, training his camera on those very lights. What he found surprised him.

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“It’s hard to explain why things are the way they are,” said Joubert, a designer, software developer, entrepreneur and city-building enthusiast, who’d heard stories of investors snapping up condos and leaving them empty.

“I basically wanted to answer that question.”

As a side project on his own time, Joubert set up a camera to watch more than a thousand units in 15 buildings at night, taking photos every five minutes from sunset to sunrise over a week, then repeating the process a few months later. Using heat maps and a custom filter, he overlaid images to get a snapshot of light patterns that he believes are a good measure of whether anyone lives in the unit.

Jaco Joubert took thermal images of 1,362 different units across 15 Toronto condo buildings to try and determine how many empty condo units are in the city. (Jaco Joubert)

His results suggest 5.6 per cent of the units he watched are unoccupied, in the middle of a housing crisis. In West Harbour City, a 36-storey condo tower just west of Bathurst Street, he found 13.5 per cent of units were vacant.

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It’s analysis that, given the number of condo units in Toronto, could mean that thousands of potential homes are just sitting empty in the sky, as the city continues to study whether a vacant homes tax might incentivize landlords to rent them out.

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“I think it’s an unreasonable state of affairs, to be honest,” said Joubert of his results.

“Some people have such excess that they can have empty units while at the same time our shelter system is overflowing.”

Buildings that have been known to have more Airbnb listings, such as the Ice condos, had fewer empty units (only 1.5 and 1.8 per cent), which he thinks is because of regular Airbnb bookings. But overall the empty rate was “much higher” than he anticipated.

He wanted to do a more extensive sample, he said, but had trouble convincing some condo associations to let him put cameras up. One ghosted him after finding out he wasn’t affiliated with a university. In the end, he used only the images he could get from his own apartment, and one friend who let him put a camera in his unit at the Picasso condos on Richmond Street West.

“I wish I could put cameras on the CN Tower, then I would have so much data with such consistency,” added the 35-year-old. But he also thinks it’s the kind of data the city should be collecting.

“Because it’s key to policy making, the lack of data means people speculate and that doesn’t lead to good policy.”

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Joubert is not against investors leaving units empty, but thinks the practice should be tied to overall vacancy rates in the city, “such that if a vacancy rate becomes too low than you simply are not allowed to do it and punitive taxes kick in.”

Toronto’s vacancy rate, a measure of how many purpose-built rental units are available on the market, was only 1.5 per cent in the second quarter of 2019, according to market research firm Urbanation. And that high demand is driving up rent, $2,262 on average for a one-bedroom condo in the third quarter of this year.

In Vancouver, where council voted in 2016 to become the first in the country to collect an empty homes tax, the city says the number of vacant properties has fallen by 15 per cent in one year.

Statistics reported by the Star’s Vancouver bureau in February show 922 properties were listed as vacant in 2018, compared with 1,085 in 2017, the first year the tax kicked in.

That city charges one per cent of a home’s assessed value if the owners are not living in it or are renting it out for less than six months.

Paul Kershaw, a University of British Columbia professor and founder of the Generation Squeeze advocacy group, called Joubert’s data “a helpful contribution to a conversation that needs to be rejuvenated in the GTA.”

Jaco Joubert took thermal images of 1,362 different units across 15 Toronto condo buildings to try and determine how many empty condo units are in the city. (Jaco Joubert)

An estimate from Statistics Canada from the 2016 census found as many as 65,000 houses and condos in Toronto are “unoccupied by usual residents.” That doesn’t mean they’re all empty. That number includes homes occupied by foreign or temporary residents, such as students living off campus who count their parents’ home as their primary address.

Regardless, “we have enough signals that there’s a problem,” Kershaw said. “Housing should be homes first, not a strategy to get rich.”

While an empty homes tax would not be a “single silver bullet” to solve the housing crisis, he believes Toronto is “missing out” on a way to “shift underutilized supply back into the rental market.”

In a short statement to the Star, a city spokesperson said the issue is under consideration.

“Staff are currently studying the options for applying a vacant home tax, including monitoring the outcomes in Vancouver and elsewhere,” wrote Boriana Varleva.

David Hulchanski, a community planner and professor of social work at the University of Toronto, said he does not understand why the city doesn’t apply a vacancy tax on empty housing. Many other big North American and European cities have this tax category, he said.

“Much more than in the past, there is a great deal of housing that is no longer used as housing for local residents,” he said, noting there’s a new research term used to describe this situation: “Not For Housing” housing.

Second homes and Airbnb units fall into this category, he said.

Residential land, which needs infrastructure such as sewers, water, electricity, schools, community centres and libraries is expensive to produce, Hulchanski said.

“So it’s simply wrong for some people who have too much money to own some extra units and instead of renting them out for housing, they’re using them for other purposes like Airbnb or leaving them vacant,” he said.

Joubert currently rents his apartment, but wants to buy something with his wife and young son. He has moved on average once a year, he said, as the hot housing market drives up rent and incentivizes landlords to sell, or push out tenants to get higher rent.

He was evicted from his last apartment, he said, so that it could be converted into an Airbnb.

“I personally don’t want to live in a city that is only wealthy people,” he said.

“The trajectory of where Toronto is heading is not ideal.”