Student Corner: Household Overcrowding in North Carolina: A Look at the Data

For community developers and housing advocates, household overcrowding has long been a key concern. Across the country, housing needs assessments often list overcrowding as an economic outcome, an indication that affordable housing supply is unavailable. That is, individuals are forced to cohabitate because they have no other available options, and should affordable housing supply appear, individuals would relocate. When broadly applied, this assumption does not necessarily align with available data. In North Carolina, as discussed below, household overcrowding is more closely correlated with ethnic and demographic characteristics than household economics. Before positioning household overcrowding as an indicator of unmet housing demand, developers and advocates should examine the specific demographic nuances of their communities. Overcrowding in North Carolina In 2007, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) commissioned a report on the measures of household overcrowding. Produced by Econometrica, Inc, the published report discusses the widely accepted benchmarks by which to gauge overcrowding as well as the potential health effects associated therein. Measured by both a Person-per-Room (PPR) and Person-per-Bedroom (PPB) basis, studies have generally used a benchmark of 1.5 for PPR and 2.0 for PPB. While both measures are accepted in the literature, depending mainly on the availability of data, Econometrica cites PPB as the preferred metric, one that more “effectively captures issues of human proximity.” Given this direction, an analysis seeking to better understand the current trends in household overcrowding in North Carolina was conducted. Using recently released 2017 microdata from the American Community Survey (ACS), a PPB metric was constructed for all respondents reporting household room data [...]

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