【Freddie Mac】The Growth of Sole-person Households: Creating Even More Demand for Smaller, More Affordable Homes (August 2021))

In the older neighborhoods in metro areas across the United States, smaller homes are being knocked down and replaced by larger homes. This trend began even before the pandemic hit. The latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Construction (SOC) shows that in 1990, 29% of new single-family homes completed had four or more bedrooms. That share had increased to 43% by 2019 (pre-pandemic) and further increased to 44% by 2020. The share of three-bedroom homes declined from 57% to 44% in 2020, and the share of homes with two bedrooms or less declined from 15% to 10% over the same period.¹ Bigger homes are important for households with larger families, but the average household size in the United States has been declining since 1960, and household composition has also changed.²

One of the key changes in household composition is the increase in sole-person households.³ In the past 40 years, sole-person households have almost doubled in the United States. According to the 2020 Current Population Survey, 36.1 million households—or 28% of all households—are sole- person (Exhibit 1). For sole-person households, in theory, massive homes may not be suitable from both a size and affordability perspective.

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