About

What this site is

housinganalytics.org turns the American Community Survey into the figures, tables, and plain-language summaries an economic-development analyst would otherwise spend days assembling per county.

What's in v1

3,222 county profiles spanning all 50 states plus D.C. and Puerto Rico · 2024 ACS 5-year estimates. Each county profile is structured to mirror the three sections of a typical housing study: Community Profile, Residential Market Analysis, and Workforce Housing Needs Assessment, plus a parametric affordability calculator.

What it does not do

housinganalytics.org does not replace subscription data sources (Zillow, CoStar, Lightcast, Woods & Poole), GIS analyses, or stakeholder qualitative research. It is intended to accelerate the ACS-derived backbone of a housing study, leaving the analyst time for everything else.

Updates

The site is rebuilt annually from a single Excel workbook when each new ACS 5-year vintage publishes in December.

Methodology notes

State and national comparisons are population-weighted aggregates of county-level estimates. These approximate but do not exactly match the medians the Census Bureau publishes at the state and national level (which use unit-level microdata). For most analytical uses the difference is immaterial; a future version will swap in published state/national medians where available.

The affordability calculator follows the 30%-of-gross-income rule that is standard practice in housing-affordability analysis. Default parameters: 30-year mortgage, 7% interest, 5% down, 0.5% PMI, $2,500/year taxes & insurance.