How do I use use the ACS data available on IPUMS to determine the housing vacancy
rate for all housing units in a city of state? Thank you. renf@umich.edu
It is possible to estimate housing vacancy rates within a geographic area, but it requires downloading an extract consisting of only household records. You will want to start by adding the variables VACANCY, STATEFIP, and CITY/MET2013 to your data cart. When you go to check-out your cart, you will be presented with an extract request screen (see screenshot below) where you can change the data structure to include only household records. You can also use the Select Cases tool to filter the data to the states/cities/metro areas that you’re interested in. Please note that not all cities and metros are identifiable in the public use file; sub-state geographies are imperfectly identified following our assignment protocol (see the CITY and MET2013 variable documentation for more information). Once your extract has been submitted and processed, you can download the file, decompress it (we recommend 7-Zip or the Unarchiver), and load it into your stats package. When tabulating VACANCY, you will want to weight your data using the household-level weight HHWT.
You can also obtain this data from the published ACS summary tables through our spatial data project, IPUMS NHGIS. These tables summarize data from the ACS microdata but may be more accurate since they are tabulated from the larger restricted microdata file and can perfectly identify cities and metro areas since they do not face the same confidentiality restrictions. By using the data finder tool (see below) and filtering by topics to Occupancy/Vacancy and Use , you can find and add data from table B25002 (Occupancy Status) to obtain vacancy rates for your place of interest.
Thank you very much for this helpful information. I appreciate your taking your time
to explain this to me.
Ren Farley