America Counts: Stories Behind the Numbers
How Disasters Affect the Nation’s Housing
For the first time this decade, U.S. Census Bureau housing unit estimates released today show the impact of natural disasters in towns and cities across the country.
California’s Butte County, site of the Camp Fire in 2018, saw the biggest decline in housing units of any county in the United States. According to the housing unit estimates for July 1, 2019, the number of units went from 100,074 to 86,209, a loss of 13,865 housing units or 13.9% between 2018 and 2019.
Timely access to detailed statistics about disaster-affected populations and housing is critical to planning, emergency response and disaster recovery. The estimates released today were developed using a different approach to capture the impact of disasters.
For this latest series of estimates, the Population Estimates Program expanded the use of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) data to add precision to the housing and population estimates for all states within the United States that experienced some type of natural disaster. Continue Reading...
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