Multifamily Permits
Housing units authorized in buildings of two or more units, measured against the resident population.
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Housing units authorized in residential buildings of two or more units, measured against the resident population.
The Census Bureau tabulates authorized units by type of structure. One-unit structures are single-family homes, including "fully detached, semidetached (semiattached, side-by-side), row houses, and townhouses." Everything above that is multifamily: "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 family counts all three of those categories together.
The Bureau's definition of multifamily housing reads: "Residential buildings containing units built one on top of another and those built side-by-side which do not have a ground-to-roof wall and/or have common facilities." Attached units separated by a ground-to-roof wall and not sharing heating, cooling or utilities are counted as single-family instead.
Multifamily permitting is the part of the pipeline that most directly changes rental supply, and it moves differently from single-family permitting: it concentrates in fewer, larger filings and responds to different financing conditions. Population denominators come from the Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program.
Metrics in this family#
Multifamily permit rate
Multifamily units authorized per 1,000 residents. Because a single apartment building can account for an entire year of activity in a smaller place, the rate is read across a window of recent years rather than a single year.
Multifamily permit trend
Change in that rate over 3, 5, or 10 years, selectable in the tool. The family also carries a one-year change and a comparison of the latest year against its own recent average.
Ten-year multifamily scale
Total multifamily units authorized over the past ten years, in absolute terms rather than per resident.
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.
Multifamily counts are the lumpiest part of this survey. A place can record zero multifamily units for several years and then a few hundred in one month. Short windows will therefore swing widely, and the absence of recent activity is not evidence that a place cannot absorb it.
Authorization is not delivery. Large multifamily projects have longer lead times than single-family ones and are more likely to stall between permit and completion.
Nonresponding permit offices are imputed by the Bureau, and multifamily units are imputed separately from single-family units, at the level of Census divisions, three large states, and structure type (methodology).
Coverage follows permit-issuing jurisdictions. Areas that require no authorization to build are outside the survey entirely, and the Bureau notes that this share "varies greatly from state to state and among metropolitan areas."
The ten-year window spans two decennial population bases, so decade-long comparisons cross one rebasing point. Connecticut, whose county-equivalent geography was replaced by planning regions, has no ten-year county reading.
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
- 2Population Estimates Programhttps://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest.html
- 3Building Permits Survey Methodologyhttps://www.census.gov/construction/bps/methodology.html