More than 500,000 new apartment units were completed across the United States last year, according to RentCafe. All of that construction can help explain a trend: The housing stock in most cities is getting younger, according to a report from PropertyShark.
Researchers analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data in cities and towns with at least 25,000 residents, then ranked all 1,839 places based on the changes in the median home age from 2013 through 2023. In 86 percent of these cities and towns, the typical home got younger.
In 2013, the typical U.S. home had been built in 1976. By 2023, it had been built in 1980 — meaning the median home age got younger by four years, according to the report. New construction was the main driver, spurred by “housing shortages, population growth and migration trends” toward larger cities and Sunbelt states.
The cities with the biggest declines in home age were Williston, N.D., and Farmers Branch, Texas (a suburb of Dallas) — 25 years each. The report notes that the population in Williston “rose by more than half while the number of homes nearly doubled,” the result of an oil boom at the end of the 2000s that attracted billions of dollars in new investments.
The next five locations on the list were in New York and New Jersey. In New York, the biggest reductions in home age were in towns in the Hudson Valley and Finger Lakes region: Middletown, Monsey and Ithaca. In New Jersey, they were in fast-developing New York City satellites: Hoboken, where the median home got younger by 19 years, and Jersey City, where it got younger by 18 years.
Which larger cities had the oldest housing stocks in the country as of 2023? In St. Louis, Mo., Buffalo, N.Y., New Bedford, Mass., Rochester, N.Y., and Providence, R.I., the median year built was 1939, making the median home age about 84.
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