DC's Rank Among Big Cities in Percentage of Housing in Multi-Unit Structures (apartment)

[revitalizer]

I did an analysis today of US cities with 500,000 persons or more and ranked them by percentage of housing in multi-unit structures as of 2012. I used the US Census Bureau's NP01 dataset for my analysis. I thought it could be fun to see how the cities stacked up in this way.

I placed a PDF of the full findings on my scribd account at: J Otavio Thompson on Scribd

Here is how DC ranks:

* DC is #5 out of the 34 US cities with population over 500,000 with 63.7% of housing in multi-unit structures.
* The average percentage of housing in multi-unit structures across all cities with a population over 500,000 is 42.4%
* DC's housing vacancy rate at 11% is exactly average for the big cities. The average is 11%
* DC's average household size at 2.2 people is lower than average among the big cities. The average is 2.6 people per household.

I look forward to sharing more of my little weekend (just for fun) analyses on the forum in the coming weeks!

[jpdivola]

+100 Nice work. Really amazing. It is so weird to see actual data presented on this forum instead of just personal opinion. Ironic considering the name.


It will be interesting to see if DC moves up the rankings in the next couple of years. We have a lot of projects in various stages of construction. The number 4, San Francisco appears to be entering a building boom. So it should be interesting to see how it pans out.

[revitalizer]

Correction: The percentage of housing in multi-unit structures is 63.3% for DC. Typo.

[revitalizer]

Originally Posted by jpdivola

+100 Nice work. Really amazing. It is so weird to see actual data presented on this forum instead of just personal opinion. Ironic considering the name.


It will be interesting to see if DC moves up the rankings in the next couple of years. We have a lot of projects in various stages of construction. The number 4, San Francisco appears to be entering a building boom. So it should be interesting to see how it pans out.

Thanks for commenting!

A few other interesting tidbits:

- 34% of DC's total housing units are in structures with 20 or more units. This category leads all other housing types (including row houses or detached single family homes) in percentage of total housing units and raw numbers. As a comparison, Philadelphia has 12.3% of total housing in structures with 20 or more units. Baltimore's is 11.5%

- Looking at it another way, 190,000 of DC's 300,000 total housing units are in multi-unit structures.

- Many row houses in DC are being split into multi-unit structures, and this trend should continue. There are plenty of permits being issued (almost daily) all over the city that are converting single family homes into multi-unit structures.

- 1-unit attached housing units comprise 24.3% of DC's housing stock. Comparison, for Baltimore they comprise 53.2% of total housing stock. Philadelphia, they represent a whopping 57.6% of total housing units! Boston - only 6.2% and NYC only 6.9%. Quite a range there.

I just find it all interesting to test how the perception of what people think of cities compares to analyses of actual city-data.

[DistrictSonic]

DC used to have a vacancy rate below 9%, but the rose to 11% is coming from new development of apartment buildings.
The city is definitely changing based on the data and is becoming more dense.

[choccity]

Originally Posted by DistrictSonic

DC used to have a vacancy rate below 9%, but the rose to 11% is coming from new development of apartment buildings.
The city is definitely changing based on the data and is becoming more dense.

Something like 1100 new residents a month.

Census: D.C. added 30,000 residents in 27 months