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M. Nolan Gray 🥑
‪@mnolangray.bsky.social‬
You hear a lot of kvetching about the lack of "family sized" units, but the data suggests the opposite: the biggest shortage is for studios and one bedroom units. Family sizes are shrinking, for better or worse.
Table from 2023 ACS attached; a tremendous imbalance remains.
3.9X as many 1-person HHs as studio apts.
0.8X as many 3+ person HHs as 3+BR units.
The direction of the shortage is very clear to me.
February 22, 2025 at 8:57 PM
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Not just for young people, either. I manage a 55+ community, and we’re chronically sold out of 655 and 825 sq ft units. The ones we have trouble unloading are the 1294 sq ft 2br with study units.
Personally, i think it’s actually bad that existing and new family-sized for-sale units are overwhelmingly concentrated in high VMT suburbs.
And that studio rentals are mostly unavailable in suburbs near good jobs.
The problem is that many of the family-sized units are occupied by just one or two people. Our larger homes aren’t effectively allocated to larger families. Because it’s easy for a small family to live in a large house, but not vice versa, we need more large homes than we have large families.
complaints about family sized units started to appear just as millenials entered their thirties.
I don't think this is a coincidence
For sure, but you could imagine some really strong spatial variation and sorting here, right? Small households are far more urban, and new urban construction is much smaller
Probably some, but the kvetching is happening in the urban centres where dwelling units are most constrained. And I wager what’s more important than spatial sorting is the collider bias when using household instead of family size.
I think there's probably something wonky going on:
3 & 4 bedrooms apartments, in my market, are primarily rented by students, because parking minimums + design specs mean 3/4 br is cheaper per br than 1/2 but still a nearly linear cost per br, ie too expensive for families.
I suspect if we ditched parking minimums and allowed single staircase reform and such we would see an increase in the number of 3/4 br apartments, and more of them actually rented by families. As is, parking minimums mean 3-4br rental SFH is cheaper or at worst comparable to a 3-4br apt
Some of this is location/age effects probably? Idk. Would need to dive deeper into the data, and I can't find public rental costs data so I'm currently having to build my own data set.
It really depends on where you are. Here in Toronto, we lack family sized units in the city so even those that would raise kids here often can't find suitable apartments, flats, or townhomes.
Really depends on the submarket. Studios in San Francisco aren’t leasing well at all.
I trust the data but this has not been my experience trying to rent apartments at all. Maybe there is a mismatch between neighborhoods and the type of apartment my demographic looks for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Interesting, at Walnut Creek BART the 3 bedroom units are all rented out but studios/1beds available.
I've been looking for newish unit in Sacramento (they build a lot, so I can afford it!) and 2+ br units with only one bath are the rare exception. I assume it's all singles doubling or tripling up.
Definitely could be it’s all double loaded corridor so a lot of interior space