Last year I moved into a city which had much older housing stock than other cities that I had lived in before. I was under-prepared for the housing market here, because I had not researched the factors that you should look into for older homes which vary a lot depending on the era that they were built in.  I created this interactive mobile friendly map to visually help show the differences in regions and counties.

Tips: There are plus [+] and minus [-] buttons to zoom in or out of the map.  You can also drag to move around the map. If you click or hover over a county, a tool tip will appear with that county’s break down of housing age. If you’re on mobile, pinch to zoom works as well.

Counties with the oldest housing

Counties with the Newest Housing

Interesting things I saw

• The gold areas (older homes) of the Midwest and Northeast are in the Rust Belt, which makes sense.
• The South-East, Texas, and Western states have seen a lot of new housing go up in the last few decades.
• The large gold areas in the Great Plains correspond to the depopulation of the rural areas in the Great Plains because of urbanization, the Dust bowl, and the Great Depression.  I had to look it up, because I thought I had made an error.

Post a comment if you found something else from the map!

Notes: the original data is from the 2014 5 Year Data Profile American Community Survey by the US Census. The Average Home Built-in metric was calculated using the data from the ACS and slightly interpolated especially for the 1939 and earlier bucket of data, because it represents such a large period of time. Also I have to give a big thanks to Nathan Yau of Flowing Data for his great tutorials.