Housing Quality – Overcrowding
This indicator reports data on overcrowded housing from the latest 5-year American Community Survey. The Census Bureau has no official definition of crowded units, but this report considers units with more than one occupant per room to be crowded.
Source
Source Description
The American Community Survey (ACS) is a nationwide survey designed to provide communities with reliable and timely social, economic, housing, and demographic data every year. The ACS has an annual sample size of about 3.5 million addresses, with survey information collected nearly every day of the year. Data are pooled across a calendar year to produce estimates for that year. As a result, ACS estimates reflect data that have been collected over a period of time rather than for a single point in time as in the decennial census, which is conducted every 10 years and provides population counts as of April 1. The Census Bureau combines 5 consecutive years of ACS data to produce estimates for geographic areas with fewer than 65,000 residents. These 5-year estimates represent data collected over a period of 60 months. Because the ACS is based on a sample, rather than all housing units and people, ACS estimates have a degree of uncertainty associated with them, called sampling error. In general, the larger the sample, the smaller the level of sampling error. Data users should be careful in drawing conclusions about small differences between two ACS estimates because they may not be statistically different.
For more information about this source, including data collection methodology and definitions, refer to the American Community Survey data user’s website.
Methodology
Data on occupants per room are acquired from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Data represent estimates for the 5-year period 2019-2023. Mapped data are summarized to 2023 census tract boundaries. Occupants per room is obtained by dividing the number of people in each occupied housing unit by the number of rooms in the unit. The figures show the number of occupied housing units having the specified ratio of people per room. The Census Bureau has no official definition of crowded units, but this report considers units with more than one occupant per room to be crowded. Occupants per room is rounded to the nearest hundredth.
For more information on the data reported in the American Community Survey, please see the complete American Community Survey 2023 Subject Definitions.
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