Number of dwellings in multi-unit buildings

Question

I have a student who wants to know how many dwellings there are, in Canada and in the US, that are part of multi-unit buildings. The types of dwellings include condos, apartments, dorms and retirement homes.

For Canadian numbers, I looked in the census through E-Stat and the closest I came to what she wants is the number of dwellings for: Apartment, building that has five or more storeys, number of occupied private dwellings and Apartment, building that has fewer than five storeys, number of occupied private dwellings.

My question is: how are rooms in retirement homes or university dorms counted and the results published? Are they simply included with the number of apartments? And do you know if rooms in retirement homes or university dorms are counted the same way in the US? The results in FedStat imply so.

Answer

Retirement homes, etc.. are considered collective dwellings : In the Census, a collective dwelling refers to a dwelling of a commercial, institutional or communal nature. Examples are lodging or rooming houses, hotels, motels, tourist homes, nursing homes, hospitals, staff residences, communal quarters, work camps, jails, missions, and group homes.

Special attention must be placed to consider that the Census records the usual place of residence. University dorms tend to be temporary residences for students and therefore they will more than likely not be showing up in Census results. University students have often returned home by the time the Census takes place and they are counted in their usual place of residence - their parents house, etc.....

The only results for collective dwellings that were published by Statistics Canada are found at the following link:
http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/Products/Analytic/companion/coll/contents.cfm