The Northeast Is Becoming Apartment Country
Apartment construction has been outpacing new houses in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. But where do families fit in?
Going up.
Photographer: Johnny Milano/Bloomberg
Over the past few years, the U.S. has seen its biggest wave of apartment construction since the 1980s. Nationwide, this hasn’t been nearly enough to displace the single-family home as the dominant form of new housing (65 percent of all new housing units for which building permits were issued in 2018 were single-unit dwellings, according to the Census Bureau), but there are some big regional differences.
What the chart shows is that a majority (51.8 percent) of the new housing units authorized last year in the Middle Atlantic states (New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania) were in buildings of five units or more. In the Pacific states, that share was 43.4 percent, in New England it was 37.9 percent, and in the West North Central states (from Kansas and Missouri to the Canadian border) it was 35.8 percent. In the other five Census Bureau subregions, it was below 30 percent. Measuring by state, units in buildings of five units or more were in the majority in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York, and they accounted for more than 40 percent of new units in California, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington.