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There may be no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation, but that’s not stopping sociologist Nathan Lauster.

The associate professor at the University of B.C. recently examined how Metro Vancouverites use their bedrooms in order to find solutions to the local housing crisis.

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Using Statistics Canada data, Lauster counted 459,994 extra bedrooms in homes across Metro, estimating that about one-fifth of all bedrooms aren’t occupied. (For his study, he allotted one bedroom to each member of the household.)

Lauster also discovered that the region’s spare bedrooms are overwhelmingly found in what he calls “super-sized dwellings,” meaning those with five bedrooms or more. Metro has more five-bedroom-plus homes than both the Toronto and Montreal metropolitan areas.

“We’ve got way more mansions than any other metropolitan area in Canada,” Lauster said in an interview Friday. “The reason for that is a lot of our land is set aside for single-family houses.”