What type of housing units are actually being built?

Every so often I read tweets complaining that the wrong kind of housing is being built. Some complain that there aren’t enough houses being built, because houses are supposedly more family-friendly. Others complain that there aren’t enough apartments being built, because later marriage rates and longer life spans mean that we have more people living alone. Still others focus on “missing middle housing” (i.e. duplexes and small apartment buildings) because they believe that such buildings can accommodate both families and singles.

This argument made me wonder: what is actually being built out there? The Census has datasets! If you go here and click the “Housing Units Completed By Purpose and Design” link you will find data going back to the 1970s. Single-family houses peaked in 2006, at 1.6 million. After nosediving during the Great Recession, house completion recovered partially- but even in 2025 just over 1 million were completed, almost a 40 percent drop. About 18 percent of these 1 million are attached, a slight increase from 2006 (when just over 14 percent were).

By contrast, the conventional apartment complex (by which I mean units in buildings with 20 or more units) has recovered from the recession. 173,000 such units were completed in 2006, and 420,000 units were built today- even more than the 1974 level of just over 350,000. (But before you scream “Aha! We are building enough apartments!” remember that this is only a 20 percent increase, in a country where population has increased by about 60 percent).

What about “missing middle” housing? These categories of housing have nosedived over the past 20 years, to an even greater extent than single-family houses: from 41,000 to 16,000 in the 2-4 unit category, from 42,000 to 11,000 in the 5-9 unit category, and from 57,000 to 37,000 in the 10-19 unit category. For all three categories, the 2006 construction level was less than half the 1974 level, so on balance less multifamily housing was built in 2025 than in 1974.*

In particular, condo construction has simply collapsed. Americans completed 192,000 multifamily for-sale units in 1974, 127,000 in 2006, and 23,000 in 2025. By contrast, multifamily rental completions are only about 25 percent below their 1974 level (461,000 in 2025, 596,000 in 1974).

So to sum up: single-family construction, condo construction, and “missing middle” construction have not recovered from the recession. Larger-scale apartment construction has recovered from the recession but is still not at 1970s levels. This suggests to me that there isn’t really enough housing built to satisfy either family demand OR nonfamily demand.

*Some pro-natalists might think that not building apartments is a fine thing, because without it renters will be forced into supposedly more family-friendly single-family or missing middle housing. So let’s look at the five states with over 60 live births per 1000 women age 15-44: Alaska, Kentucky, Nebraska and the Dakotas. If fertility was related to apartment buildings, these would be states where the overwhelming majority of renters lived in houses and duplexes. This is certainly true in Alaska and Kentucky (where only 18 and 22 percent of renter-occupied units are in apartment buildings with over 10 units). But in South Dakota, 40 percent of renter-occupied housing units are in such apartment buildings- more than in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Oregon or Vermont (the lowest-fertility states). The comparable numbers for Nebraska and North Dakota are 40 percent and 57 percent. So there isn’t really a strong correlation here.