For the first three years of my career, I mostly wrote about condominiums. From 2015 to 2017, I worked as an assistant editor at Urban Toronto, a website covering local development across the city and its immediate suburbs. It was a blur of rezoning proposals, official plan amendments, community meetings, site plan applications, demolition permits, groundbreaking ceremonies and construction updates. Every week, new high-rise applications hit the municipal database as Toronto lapped North American counterparts in construction cranes, reflecting the scale of a development and population boom only paralleled in China and the Middle East. Almost all of them were condominiums.
About a year into my tenure, we welcomed co-op students from a local high school. While they quickly absorbed the urbanist lexicon, the term “condo” became a metonym for any of the myriad proposals or construction sites shaping the city. Whether it was an office tower, a purpose-built rental, or even an infrastructure project, they’d call it a “condo.” I didn’t blame them. After all, I noticed variations of the trend among my friends and parents, even industry colleagues. In the Urban Toronto office, it became a running joke. Whenever one of us wanted a stapler, pen, highlighter or a pad of paper, we’d ask a colleague to “pass me that condo.”
Not anymore. For the first time since the turn of the millennium, the condominium market has effectively ground to a dead stop, exhausting a stream of development that held surprisingly steady through the ebbs and flows of recessions (2008), market corrections (2018) and even a global pandemic. For many of us, the effects aren’t yet palpable; construction cranes still dot the skyline, reflecting the afterglow of a generational boom. In 2025, however, the CMHC recorded the lowest condo construction starts since records began in 1998, all as pre-construction buyers scrambled to offload their contracts — often at a substantial loss — while developers pivoted their projects to purpose-built rentals or cancelled them altogether.
What happens next? With the future of Canadian housing at a precipice, forecasting its evolution is predicated on understanding the historical and economic context that made condominiums so popular in the first place. How have condominiums shaped Canadian urban life? What were their origins? How and why did we build so many? For that matter, what exactly is a condominium anyway?