Tenure by age
How old the people holding a place's homes are: the prime-age share of its renters and the senior share of its owners.
Who is holding the homes here, by the age of the householder.
The Census Bureau cross-tabulates tenure with the age of the householder — the person in whose name the home is owned or rented, and the reference person the rest of the household is described in relation to (ACS Subject Definitions). Each occupied unit contributes exactly one householder, so these are shares of homes, not shares of people.
Prime-age renter share adds renter-occupied units whose householder is 25 to 34 or 35 to 44 and divides by all renter-occupied units. Senior owner share adds owner-occupied units whose householder is 65 to 74, 75 to 84, or 85 and over, and divides by all owner-occupied units. Each denominator is one side of the tenure split, not all occupied units, so the two measures are read within their own tenure rather than against each other.
Metrics in this family#
Considerations#
These two shares answer a question the overall homeownership rate cannot: two places with the same split between owning and renting can be entirely different places depending on who is doing each. A rental stock held by householders in their thirties and a rental stock held by householders in their seventies imply different demand, different turnover and different futures for the same building.
Because the denominators differ, a place can be high on both, low on both, or high on one and low on the other, and none of those four combinations is a contradiction.
Age is the householder's age, not the household's. A three-generation household is recorded at the age of one person, and a household of unrelated adults sharing a rental is recorded at the age of whoever is named first, so a shared student house and a single occupant of the same age read alike here.
Both measures are levels only. No trend is published for either, because a tract's renter or owner count is small enough that the year-to-year movement in a share of a share is dominated by sampling variation.
Tracts with very few occupied units on one side of the tenure split carry a wide margin of error on that side, and a tract made up largely of group quarters has few conventional occupied units at all.
ACS 5-year windows overlap, so each vintage shares four of its five years with the one before it. Census tract boundaries were redrawn for the 2020 census and earlier estimates are carried onto current boundaries before use — see geography.
References#
- 1ACS Subject Definitionshttps://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/subject_definitions/2024_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf