Predicting the Future of Your City

Finding Where Housing Will Turn Over in the Next Decade

One of the great challenges for any city is to be ready for the unforeseen — natural disasters, economic trends, shifting demographics. Thanks to easy access to demographic data and the simplification of data analysis tools every planner and policy maker in the country should now be using data to answer our most basic and urgent urban questions about the future.

This post will demonstrate how you can predict which parts of a city will experience the most dramatic housing turnover in the decade ahead.

Predicting Housing Turnover

Housing turns over for many reasons, but the aging Baby Boomers represent an enormous cohort who’ve remained in their single family homes. However, the Boomers will be leaving their homes en masse over the coming decade.

The trick will be knowing exactly when and where that turnover will occur. The evidence points to amazing stability in the housing market until right around the age of 80. At that point, turnover is dramatic.

If we know that Boomers will be leaving their homes around the age of 80, and we know where those homes are, we can know ahead of time which parts of a community will be most dramatically impacted.

In the following maps let’s answer the question ‘Where will housing turn over in the Raleigh-Durham area?’ by applying this methodology.

How To: Raleigh-Durham

Step one: First let’s overlay the total owner occupied housing units and total population over the age of 65 in the Raleigh Durham area (displayed by census block groups in the map below).

Step two: Now we will normalize owner occupied housing by total housing units and the population over the age of 65 by the total population, yielding a clearer sense of the density of Baby Boomers in single family homes.

Step 3: In this final map we filtered out all of the block groups where owner occupancy is less than 40% and population over 65 is less than 15%. The resulting map highlights the areas with major impending housing turnover. Block groups with a bluish tint will be radically impacted. We also layered in charts that show actual householder age and the home value.

The best way to view these is to check out the interactive version of this map that allows you to look at individual block groups and really dive into the data for a particular place.

When you look at the data, it becomes clear where there will be large pockets of massive change.

The impact of this turnover will remake America’s cities, and the cities that prepare will be the winners in the decades ahead.

If anyone would like a map like this for your city, just let us know here (it’s free and there isn’t a catch).