A common claim among housing policy laypeople, particularly on social media, is that there are some 15 million vacant homes in the U.S. This claim is typically associated with the implication that those vacant homes are new units, held for investment purposes, in high-price cities. The 15 million number comes from the Census Bureau’s definition of “vacant”, which includes any home without a permanent resident, including homes that have been sold or rented, but the new resident has not yet moved in.

Moreover, the remaining approximately 5 million units are overwhelmingly abandoned and uninhabitable buildings, either in decaying urban cores or long-declining rural areas. The app below displays the number (in total and per 1,000 residents) of vacant homes, either at the county level, or at the tract level for the largest 150 counties. You can view the source code for this map and the graph above on my Github page.