How DC Housing Has Changed Since 2008

• April 21, 2015

by Lark Turner

Housing prices compared to income.

In a new post to its blog District Measured, the Office of Revenue Analysis looked at how the city’s economy has changed since 2008 and where things stand now in the wake of the recession. The post — drawn from a variety of public data sources — points to two trends in DC’s housing market that have significantly shifted over the last six years.

One is prices: Housing prices, the post notes, have increased faster than incomes in DC over the last seven years. The value of single-family housing units went up by 37 percent as incomes rose 25 percent.

The other relates to housing units. The District added more new households, as defined by the Census, than housing units. (The Census uses “household” to mean occupied housing unit.) Households jumped by 29,000 between 2008 and 2014, but new housing permits increased at a smaller rate. To compare, District Measured came up with two different figures for the number of new units: new housing permits (12,483) and the combined number of new condo units sold, permits for projects of one to four units and increased occupancy in larger, market-rate rental apartment buildings (14,372).

Either way, the post suggests housing permit data doesn’t capture the number of units that have been added in the city: “Population increase .. seems likely to have been accompanied by significant adjustment to and renovation of the DC housing stock beyond what is captured in the housing permit data,” District Measured concludes.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/how_dc_housing_has_changed_since_2008/9791