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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Statistical agency employee here again. I did a little more digging to see what other pieces of information we could get to understand what's actually going on. It seems like a number of people on here are more interested in rehashing their pet complaints than in understanding what's happening, but I'll share for anyone who's interested. If you think my post is too long and just want to complain, save your keystrokes; I don't care.

The Census Bureau also produces something called the CPS Housing Vacancy Supplement (HVS), which reports vacancy rates for owner-occupied and rental housing units for each quarter and for each state and metro. These are pretty noisy estimates, because the CPS only samples something like 72k households a month nationwide, which means each quarterly estimate for DC is based on only ~450 observations split between rentals and owned properties. The vacancy rate is also only an indirect measure of population change, since households can grow or shrink without becoming vacant, and since construction of new units changes the denominator over time. But, this survey provides much more timely data on what happened with population movements. It doesn't have the same issues of laggy data sources or of problematic proportionality assumptions as the intercensal population estimates (see my prior post). It does still have some caveats re: surveys conducted in a pandemic, similar to the concerns about representativeness in the decennial Census that forms the baseline for the intercensal population estimates.

What you can see for DC is that the DC vacancy rate for owner-occupied properties (houses and condos not intended for rental) is quite low and hasn't really changed much from 2018 to Q3 of 2021 (no Q4 data yet). There numbers bounce around a bit quarter to quarter, but if you average over the quarters of the year you get an average between 1.2% and 1.4% for each of the last four years. This is notably well below what the vacancy rates were back before 2015 and especially back before 2010 (often over 3%). So if homeowners with kids are moving to the suburbs, it's clear that new homeowners have continued to replace them.

Looking at rental vacancy rates is another story. Rental vacancy rate estimates are much noisier than homeowner vacancy rates (probably because renters and their landlords are harder to get survey responses from). But, the estimates for 2018 and 2019 suggest a baseline of between 6 and 8 percent rental vacancy, which is on the low end for DC by historical standards going back to 2005. The first two quarters of 2020 followed this same pattern (7.4% and 6.8%), but there was a big increase in rental vacancy starting in Q3 2020. It went to 8.7% and then 9.9% in 2020, and then to 10.5% and 11.0% in the first two quarters of 2021, before falling back considerably to 9.9% in Q3 2021. These are mostly within the margin of error of one another (which again, is very big because of the small sample), but taking them at face value suggests a big jump up that has started to retreat but still has quite a ways to fall to get back to where it was before the pandemic.

It's also worth mentioning that these trends don't show up if you look at DC metro level data or national data, only if you look at DC itself. This suggests that city renters left the city specifically, but renters didn't leave rentals more generally. However, since DC is the only city-state we have, it's really hard to know how DC compares to other cities in that regard. It would probably be possible for someone to recreate these statistics using the public CPS microdata for a few of the larger cities in the US, but it would be a project.

Overall, these data say a few things to me. First, as mentioned by myself and others, it looks like the vast majority of the movement has been among renters. The low vacancy rates and strong price appreciation for owned properties in DC doesn't provide any evidence to suggest a decline in demand for this type of living. Second, the big jump in 2020 Q3 and the big decline in 2021 Q3 suggest to me that a good chunk of this is in the form of lack of the usual young transplant pipeline. In other words, recent college grads moved home instead of moving here in summer 2020; in summer 2021 that was perhaps a little less true but still an issue. Going forward, we might expect any big shifts in population and vacancy to coincide with summer turnover and incoming new residents. Third, the issues I raised with lag in the intercensal population projections may not be as bad as I thought. Barring major sampling issues in 2020, it seems pretty clear that the peak of rental vacancy, and presumably of peak population loss, was in early 2021. Fourth, we still only have one quarter of data to evaluate the recovery, but it does seem to be substantially underway.

If you're actually interested in this topic, I'd suggest keeping an eye on the next few quarterly releases of these HVS data. By this time next year, I imagine that we will have a pretty good sense of how durable the rise in rental vacancies is, and we'll have much more price data as well. Q3 2022 will be a particularly interesting data point to see. I would still wait a couple of years before really leaning on the intercensal population estimates, given the issues that I've highlighted before.

Sources: 
https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/rates.html
https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/methodology/index.html[/quote]

This is a wonderful analysis.  Thank you![/quote]

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