FOLLOWUP: How Many People are Moving to Durham per Day

Original Post: http://www.buildingbullcity.com/2020/06/followup-how-many-people-are-moving-to.html

Re: "where are the people"  Perhaps they are doubling up/crowding together.  And, now they may have to stay that way, but it's no so good for preventing the spread of Covid 19.  

That is very possible. I imagine there were some single people living in a 3 bedroom houses. There probably still are, but fewer.

And in terms of those in poverty, they may be squeezing in more and more.

This is all conjecture of course. I have no data that suggests more people are squeezing together, but I think it is a reasonable hypothesis.

I don't quite understand how you looked at housing units - just overall units by number of bedrooms or did you look at the mismatch of household size to number of bedrooms? I think that statistic is really eye-opening, and one of the arguments for EHC. (See older ACS data in the top slide on pg. 5 here: https://durhamnc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/23567/Presentation).

Sure. I actually just lost access to Social Explorer, so I can't add a screenshot, but essentially, they breakdown household units by category. So, if you looked at Durham, you could see:

1-Person Households: # of Units
2-Person Households: # of Units

etc

So, I multiplied # of people in a household by # of units to get how much "space" there was for people and compared that growth across years.

I don't quite understand the reason that growth number doesn't equal the population growth, though. It may be one of the conjectures above, or it may be an idiosyncrasy in the two forms of data such that you can't really compare them.

Oh interesting. Social Explorer does make that data analysis easier.

I've also heard that Duke is not allowing more than one person per dorm room, which is pushing students out into the private market looking for housing.

The data next year and a few years in the future will definitely be really interesting to compare to past trends.