2011 Housing Planning Study - Inventory Report

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increase in non-residential units20 late in the cycle. The occupied unit estimates from ACS are more volatile, but suggest an increase in residential vacancy early in the cycle and that occupancy caches up with production after the peak. We will return to these findings in the HHPS final report. They are important evidence that writ large, Hawaii's housing unit production (supply) follows housing demand. But if permit authorization can be taken as an indication of supply side reaction to demand, actual production meets only about 20 to 25 percent of that demand statewide. Across the entire analysis, however, the data suggest that the process of developing special purpose inventories for Housing Policy Studies has been increasingly accurate over the first 14 years. In recent years, however, the split between single-family and multi-family production becomes less clear and our confidence in the inventory alone diminishes. At the same time, HHPS special purpose inventories produce useful information on data not found in the Census and American Community Survey. Data of particular use to housing planners on Hawaii, such as the role of leasehold properties, military housing, condominium status, and distribution of stock by Tax Map Zones, cannot be extracted from the either dataset produced by the Census Bureau. On the down side, special purpose inventories are not currently available for years between the Housing Policy Studies and are of limited use in establishing trend data. U.S. Census data for Hawaii have similar problems for establishing trends, but the growing precision of the American Community Survey data offers greater confidence that ACS estimates will produce reliable trends and year-on-year change data for housing planning. Furthermore, while the Census sources do not provide data on leasehold and condominium status, the ability to estimate the number of units available to the housing market is a strong plus for ACS. We look forward to combining these new inventory numbers, with their enhanced accuracy in estimating general supply characteristics, to the forecasting model and to planning decisions in 2011. 20 Recall that available units =total units minus units used for non-residential purposes, and occupied units =total units minus total vacant units. Hawari Housing Planning Study,2011 -Inventory Report Page 18 0 SMS, Inc. November,2011