The newest batch of Census data is out — a five-year look back on the state of America through the lenses of housing, income, fertility, and more. It is chock-full of data, which you can cut up into random sound bites, like the median age of Americans is 38.7 years old, Syracuse leads the country in child poverty, fewer grandparents are raising children, perhaps due to a decline in opioid-related deaths, and other stats. I am likely going to dive into this data and create future posts from it. For now, I wanted to quickly share some housing-oriented takeaways.
There are more homeowner-occupied units nowadays
I love it when hard data conflicts with media narratives. There’s been so much attention to how people are priced out of the housing market and how all the housing is getting bought up by investors. But is that really the case?
According to the new Census data: The number of owner-occupied housing units increased by 8.4 percent, from 76.4 million in 2014-2018 to 82.9 million in 2019-2023.
There’s more math to be done here, such as figuring out the ratio of owner-occupied housing units to overall housing units in these two periods, but bottom line: this doesn’t line up with the narrative that owner-occupied units are in decline.
More homeowners aren’t carrying a mortgage
The ACS compares five-year periods. From 2014-2018, 36.9 percent of owned homes did not have a mortgage. In the most recent data from 2019-2023, 38.8 percent did not have a mortgage.
There are many potential reasons for this: investors buying houses with all cash; bidding wars in the early days of the pandemic favoring all-cash buyers, high interest rates pushing people to forgo mortgages, homeowners who are getting older and older and may have more equity; or the generational wealth transfer from baby boomers to millennials is allowing more young people to buy houses without mortgages.
“The increase in the number of owned homes without a mortgage could partially explain why the median amount of income homeowners spent toward housing costs decreased from 18.3 percent to 17.5 percent,” said Caroline Short, a survey statistician in the Census Bureau’s Housing Statistics Branch.
There’s a growing divide between homeowners and renters
It’s shocking, but according to the Census: There were no counties where the median homeowner costs, as a percentage of income, was greater than 30 percent, whereas in over 200 counties, the median gross rent as a percentage of income was greater than 30 percent.
In other words, homeowners can actually afford their housing. And lots of renters can’t. In addition, the number of housing units where people are cost-burdened has gone up.
There were 20.0 million rented units paying more than 30 percent of their monthly income toward housing costs in the 2019-2023 5-year ACS, as opposed to 17.3 million owned units.
Most counties have not seen a rise in income, but nationwide there’s been a 21 percent rise in housing prices
Nearly two-thirds of all U.S. counties (2,010) did not have a statistically significant change in median household income between the two reporting periods (so, over the past decade).
Meanwhile, “home values increased 21.7 percent between the 2014-2018 ACS 5-year estimates and the 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, going from a median of $249,400 to $303,400 (estimates from 2014-2018 are adjusted for inflation).”
This, in addition to the data above about renters vs. homeowners, shows why so many people feel crushed in this economy.
Expensive, second-home areas have seen some of the most price appreciation
The counties with some of the largest dollar amount increases included Pitkin County, Colorado ($758,800 to $1,131,200), which includes Aspen; Teton County, Wyoming ($1,007,200 to $1,371,900), which includes Jackson Hole; Dukes County, Massachusetts ($812,400 to $1,104,100), which includes Martha’s Vineyard; and Summit County, Utah ($729,000 to $1,000,400), which includes Park City.
With remote work, people are either moving to resort areas full time or spending more time in their second homes there. Does this matter for anyone other than the .0001 percent? Maybe not. But it does indicate how desperately these areas need to employ different strategies to build affordable housing for regular workers, too. (See my take on that topic from this past summer.)
Did remote work boost fertility?
In just three states, the rate of women aged 15 to 50 with a birth in the past 12 months increased in 2019-2023 compared to their rates in 2014-2018. Guess what — two out of three of them were in high-cost, blue states: New York and New Jersey. (Mississippi also had a higher fertility rate.)
One reason for New Jersey’s higher fertility rate may be the higher number of foreign-born residents. The state ranked third, behind Florida and Texas, for numeric change in foreign-born residents.
But another reason may be remote work. There has been discussion about how remote work could boost fertility rates by enabling more families to move to lower-cost housing and grow their families. I need to dive into this data at the county level, but this stat could support that idea. In the past five years, many of the people moving in New York and New Jersey were moving to lower-cost areas, such as leaving New York City for the suburbs. Perhaps that enabled more people to have a first child or more children.
Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter, The New Urban Order. Sign up for the newsletter here.
