A Condo in the U.S. refers to a specific type of apartment that you can buy, and usually cannot rent out or modify. Typically they have all the trimmings out of the latest catalogues when they are built, so they fetch expensive single family home prices due to all that granite. They are popular for downsizing after your kids have moved out of your house, or find yourself widowed or divorced. Due to their illiquidity and lack of space, they are less popular for younger people who might want more bedrooms some day if they have children.

In most major cities in the U.S., any sort of property, even an empty dirt lot, is prohibitively expensive to the majority of the population. In LA in particular, the median home is unaffordable to 75% of the population. And the median home is a rotting bungalow precariously positioned on wooden posts built in 1947.

Well, in Toronto they are quite expensive, so it really doesn't help. And that is mostly by design. If Google wants to build cheap condos, then so be it, I don't think anyone will oppose them.

They would have to be really cheap though, because in NA condos can generally not be rented out.

NA condos can be rented out, it depends on the HOA terms but renting someone else’s condo is like renting out someone else’s house. Many condos are designed as investment properties to be rented out by their owners (eg the 4 bedroom condo near a university....).

Almost everyone I know lives in a rented condo.

That's called an apartment, and is not what Google was building.

Condominium in Ontario (Toronto is in Ontario) is a form of ownership, it had nothing to do with the physical form of the home.

You can own a condominimum townhouse (a row of single family homes with front yard, driveways, garage attached by common walls) or a condominium apartment (in say a 30 storey building with 10 parents per floor)

And yes, you can rent out a condominium apartment. Approx 60 % of the rental units in the Greater Toronto Area are condominium apartments.

Most of Toronto's rental stock is privately owned condos, rented out. There is next to no Condo Corporations in Ontario that aren't senior specific that ban renting the unit to long term tenants (many ban short term AirBnb in their bylaws).