Large Multifamily Permit Share
The share of newly authorized housing units that are in structures of five or more units.
The Census Bureau publishes authorized units in four structure-type categories. "The one-unit structure category is a single-family home... Multifamily structures are classified by the number of housing units in the structure. Data are tabulated for 2 units, 3 and 4 units combined, and 5 or more unit structures" (Building Permits Survey definitions). This measure isolates the largest of those categories.
Five-or-more-unit structures are a narrower thing than multifamily generally. Duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes are usually built by small builders on infill lots and financed much like houses. Five-plus buildings are the apartment product: institutionally financed, professionally managed, and typically the form that follows an upzoning or a corridor plan. A place can have a high overall multifamily share built almost entirely from small structures, or from a handful of large ones, and the two describe different markets.
Metrics in this family#
Considerations#
Annual figures run from 2013 and monthly figures from January 2020, in both cases through the most recent release. Publication lags the present, and recent periods can move as late reports arrive.
This is a subset of the multifamily share, not an alternative to it. Every unit counted here is also counted in Multifamily Permit Share, which additionally includes two-, three- and four-unit structures.
The category has no upper bound. A 12-unit walkup and a 400-unit tower are both recorded as five-or-more-unit structures, and the survey publishes the count of buildings alongside the count of units but draws no further size distinction.
This is the most concentrated series in the survey. Large projects are rare events in most places, so the share is zero for long stretches and then very high for one period. Read it as a description of what has been authorized recently, not as a rate that a place sustains.
The Bureau imputes activity for nonresponding permit offices, and units and buildings in the five-or-more-unit category are imputed independently of one another (methodology).
Some jurisdictions do not issue permits across all structure types. The Bureau's place-level documentation records permit systems that cover only one-to-three-family or one-to-two-family buildings, and notes that in Montana the state issues permits for residential buildings of five units or more while local jurisdictions handle smaller ones (place documentation). Where that split occurs, large multifamily activity may be recorded against a different jurisdiction than the surrounding smaller construction.
Permits are published for places, counties and metro areas, not tracts. See how we combine geographies.
References#
- 1Building Permits Survey definitionshttps://www.census.gov/construction/bps/definitions.html
- 2Building Permits Survey Methodologyhttps://www.census.gov/construction/bps/methodology.html
- 3Residential Building Permits Survey Documentation: Place ASCII Fileshttps://www.census.gov/construction/bps/sample/placeasc.pdf