1.4% vacancy in a housing market is extraordinarily low. Remember: there is structurally always some material amount of vacancy, because people vacate housing units well before new people move into them. This, by the way, is a stat whose interpretation you can just look up. Real estate people use it as a benchmark.
Yeah I know it's among the lowest in the world, it's still an ~order of magnitude higher than a few tenths of a percent, which would be shocking for the reasons you mention.
My point though was just that I've seen arguments that these numbers can be manipulated, and the city's own data doesn't make sense by itself: either the 1.4% number is wrong or the slowly recovering population estimate is wrong. Especially considering the 60,000 housing units (representing 2% growth) created.
I was replying to this claim
> They leave it empty (that actually happens a lot, especially with foreign investors
Not talking about rental vacancy.