Public education accounts for almost 40% of local government direct expenditures per housing unit, based on data from the Census of Government. School impact fees on new construction are typically determined in part by assumptions about the number of children in public schools per housing unit. The most recent 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) data…
A recent NAHB Special Study uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NYLS) to study lifetime homeownership rates and how long individuals sustain in homeownership. The study finds a lifetime homeownership rate of 90.5% among the 1979 NLSY cohort, meaning that most people become homeowners at some point in life (Figure 1). This finding is…
Housing markets in the Midwest have experienced weakness in recent quarters. For example, single-family permits posted a 3.6% decline in year-to-date data when comparing December 2018 level with December 2017 in the Midwest. Single-family permitting for the first four months of 2019 are down 11.3% in the Midwest when compared to the opening months of…
Vacancy rates are one of the key statistics NAHB Economics tracks to judge the health and direction of the housing market. The currently low homeowner and rental vacancy rates are typically interpreted as a sign of tight housing markets, with lower vacancy rates signaling a greater housing shortage. NAHB’s analysis of the latest 2017 ACS…
The United States Post Office has been attempting to reduce or eliminate sidewalk and curbside delivery of mail to individual homes, especially in new subdivisions. Instead, the Post Office now wants to deliver mail primarily to centralized or “cluster” mail boxes, each serving multiple homes in a development. So far, implementation of this policy has varied across the…
About two years ago, NAHB reported that 22 percent of single-family builders had used aerial drones (or unmanned aircraft systems, as the Department of Defense calls them) at least once in their construction businesses. But the times they are a-changing. When we revisited the issue in March of this year, we saw that the percentage…
NAHB regularly conducts national polls of American adults and home buyers in order to understand new trends and preferences in the housing market. This is the fifth in a series of posts highlighting poll results, as presented during the 2018 International Builders’ Show in Orlando, FL. See previous posts on tiny homes, driverless cars, time…
