About - Housing Forecast

Housing Forecast is a housing planning tool for communities in the US: an out-of-the-box dashboard highlighting local housing trends and needs with interactive maps, charts, and guiding text. Housing Forecast is meant for curious residents, researchers, planners, developers, financial professionals, and policymakers alike.

For each place, Housing Forecast considers demographic and employment trends, evaluates existing and planned housing supply, and identifies misalignments between available units and resident needs. Each Housing Forecast concludes with a local housing production target: an estimate of how much housing a place would need to build to accommodate projected growth and reduce supply strains that make housing less affordable. Charts include sources and methodology, and are updated on at least an annual basis as new data is released.

If you're a...

Curious resident: Use Housing Forecast to understand why you or someone you know can't find housing options, and what your community might be able to do about it.
Student or researcher: Explore and compare housing trends across geographies, export charts and tables for papers or reports, and access the underlying methodology and data sources.
Planner or municipal staffer: Get a shared baseline of local housing conditions, track year-over-year progress, and communicate housing needs to elected officials and the public.
Developer or financial professional: Quickly assess housing supply gaps and demand signals in communities you're evaluating for investment.
Policymaker or advocate: Make the case for a zoning reform, housing trust fund, or inclusionary policy with data-backed visuals you can drop into presentations or testimony.

Using Housing Forecast

There are many ways to use Housing Forecast: as a dashboard or a library of tables, charts, maps, and raw data.

Start with a common reference point to facilitate conversations about housing solutions.

Housing conversations can stall when different stakeholders are working with different information. Housing Forecast gives planners, residents, developers, and elected officials a common set of facts to anchor conversations, so the debate can shift from whether there's a problem to what to do about it. The glossary provides plain-language definitions of the terms used throughout, so no planning background is required.

Explore and compare local trends.

Housing Forecast covers every city, town, and county in the US, so you can look up your community, compare it to a neighboring jurisdiction, and explore how housing conditions differ across a region. Every Housing Forecast uses consistent definitions, data sources, and methodology, to support comparison.

Dig into the details about a place.

Housing Forecast goes beyond headline numbers. For each community, you'll find charts breaking down not just who lives there, but who can afford to move there; not just what the housing stock includes, but what the housing stock needs, to address existing and projected shortages. Housing Forecast might often confirm what locals already experience: that finding the right housing, at the right price, in the right place, has gotten harder. Housing Forecast puts numbers and charts behind that lived experience, and goes a step further to explain some of the specific dynamics driving it.

Track a community's progress.

Maybe your community has started to implement regulatory changes and financial tools to help different kinds of housing get built. Housing Forecast analyses update as frequently as monthly to help you track local progress in real time.

Get a conversation started.

Use Housing Forecast to illustrate the issues you care about, or make a case for local investment or policy change. If you're a local policymaker, pitching a planning exercise or regulatory reform, you might send a link to your Planning Board or Housing Trust, embed charts into an existing Town dashboard, or import a chart or table into the presentation you're preparing for a public workshop.

Incorporate data and charts into a plan, study, or grant proposal.

Housing Forecast charts and tables are easy to export and add to any document or presentation. Maybe you're writing a local housing needs assessment, or defining the role of a local housing trust, or putting together a grant proposal to fund an upzoning. Housing Forecast materials can help you articulate why a local housing action matters, or identify which part of the problem you want a given action to address.

About the Data

Housing Forecast draws on data from the American Community Survey (ACS), ACS Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and Zillow.

American Community Survey (ACS)

The American Community Survey is an annual demographics survey program conducted by the United States Census Bureau that gathers information on educational attainment, income, migration, employment, housing characteristics, and more.

Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS)

PUMS files are anonymized, individual- or household-level records from the ACS. These sources are available for free from the US Census Bureau to provide statistically-significant data for analysis to guide funding, policy, and planning for demographics and housing throughout the country.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics is a government agency that collects and publishes data on labor market activity, employment, price changes, and productivity.

Zillow

Zillow home value estimates provide the typical home value across a region and market type using the Zillow Home Value Index methodology. This data is published monthly.

Housing Forecast Glossary

Area median income (AMI): The midpoint of household incomes in a specific geographic area. Housing Forecast uses the AMI calculated by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which takes raw survey income data from the ACS and adjusts for inflation.
Affordability gap: The difference between the area median income and the income needed to afford a typical home. When the income required to purchase a typical home is higher than the area median income, homeownership will be financially challenging or out of reach for most households.
Household: In ACS data, a household describes all the people who occupy a housing unit. Households are categorized as family households (such as a married couple) and nonfamily households (where single people or unrelated adults, such as roommates, live together).
Householder: One of the people in whose name the home is owned or rented. This is the primary "reference person" to whom all other family or household members are described in relation to in the ACS and the Census.
Housing stock: The building type of homes, including single-family detached houses, single-family attached (like rowhouses), and different sizes of multifamily or apartment buildings. The "other" category primarily describes mobile and manufactured homes.
Tenure: Describes whether the household living in a housing unit owns the home, rents the home, or if the home is vacant.
Vacant: Every housing unit counted in the ACS is categorized as occupied (currently inhabited) or vacant. Vacant housing includes houses for sale, apartments for rent, and seasonally-vacant housing like vacation homes.
Population outlook: Housing Forecast compiles data on the count and age of people living in a community to show how a place has changed over time. Using this information, a 5-year population outlook shows how the population is likely to change in the future based on recent trends.

Every community's housing story, told in data