The Metropolitan Area Quarterly Residential and Business
Vacancy Report for the quarter ending March 31, 2009 was recently added
to HUD USER’s library of online data
sets. The report is derived from the U.S. Postal Service
(USPS) universe of addresses with mail delivery. The
USPS identifies a house, apartment, office, or building
that is unoccupied for at least 90 days as vacant.
Through a special agreement with USPS, the vacancy data
is aggregated to the census tract level and made
available to the public through HUD’s Office of Policy
Development & Research (PD&R), thus providing a critical
measure of the well-being of America’s communities. PD&R
provides these data to complement vacancy information
available from the American Community Survey, Housing
Vacancy Survey, the American Housing Survey, and other
sources.
The data include:
- Total number of residential and business addresses
recorded in the USPS database;
- Total number of vacant addresses that delivery staff
on urban routes have identified as being vacant (not
collecting their mail) for 90 days or longer; and
- Residential and business vacancy rates.
In addition, PD&R also calculates the average number of
days that addresses are vacant, the number of addresses
vacant by time periods, and changes in status over the
previous quarter.
