Is DC Becoming a Land of Singletons?

• September 13th 2013

by Shilpi Paul

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Two news items earlier this week only bolstered the thinking that DC is becoming a town of single people. The first was a report on Tuesday that revealed sales for homes smaller than 800 square feet skyrocketed between August 2012 and August 2013 in the city. The second was a report that the number of single tax-filers in the District has increased significantly over the last decade.

These two things alone do not prove the thesis, so we went about compiling statistics and anecdotes that show DC is increasingly turning into a land of singletons:

• According to 2010 Census data, 45 percent of the households in the District are now single-person households, the highest percentage in the country (tied with Atlanta). Arlington and Alexandria also cracked the top ten.

• In 2011, 63 percent of all tax filers in the city were single, an increase of 38 percent compared to 2001. Between 2001 and 2011, 65,900 new residents filed taxes for the first time in the District; 87.5 percent of these new filers were single.

• Micro-unit developments are booming in the District. New projects at The Wharf in Southwest, on 9th Street NW and on the 14th Street corridor all have a significant number of micro-units planned.

• While we don’t have exact stats, a number of the new residential projects being built in the city have a much higher percentage of studio and one-bedroom units than two-bedrooms. For example, more than half of the units at The Aston, on the 14th Street Corridor, are studios or one-bedrooms, and at Northern Exchange, almost 90 percent of the units are studios or one-bedrooms. The Irwin and 1919 14th Street will almost entirely be composed of studios and one-bedrooms.

• Accordingly, sales of studios and one-bedrooms are increasing significantly in the city. There were 227 sales in this segment in August, representing a 43 percent spike from the 159 sold in August last year. 30 percent of sales in the District were 0-1 bedroom units, up from 26 percent in August 2012.

• As a Greater Greater Washington article pointed out earlier this year, DC used to have many many more households with children than single-person households. In 1960, married couples with children outnumbered singletons three to one; in 2010, singles outnumbered married couples with children at a rate of 5.57 to one.

Will the singles trend continue? If so, what impact will this have, if any, on the folks who want to partner up, have children and expand their households while living in DC?

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/is_dc_becoming_a_land_of_singletons/7542.