The nature of housing in Cobb County is often a topic that generates controversy.
How many times have you heard when new construction is proposed that a goal is to “preserve the character of the community?” This is particularly true when multi-family housing and rental property is proposed.
Home values also affect your tax bill in two ways. If your property values go up, your tax bill probably will, too. And if the overall tax digest in the county is too small or too large to meet the county’s budget needs, elected officials have the options of raising the millage rate, keeping it the same, or cutting it.
Plus it’s just interesting to know what the county looks like as a whole in terms of housing.
So part of really understanding your county is to know how people live. And that starts with knowing a bit about what their physical homes are like.
The most reliable source of accurate data on housing is the 5-year American Community Survey. There is a detailed description of what the survey is, and why it’s important, at the bottom of this article. But the 5-year ACS for the years from 2018-2022 was released recently, and is the source of the numbers in this article.
We’ve provided a CSV file that you can load into the spreadsheet of your choice that has not only the data below, but a lot more information about housing in Cobb County.
The basics
Let’s start with the basics of how many housing units are in the county, and what sort of structures there are.
A housing unit isn’t just a building. It’s a space where an individual or family can live. So an apartment building with 20 units is 20 units. A single-family detached house is one unit.
Buildings are structures and can represent one units or multiple units.
There are 308,949, and at the time the survey was completed 291,171 of them were occupied. The vacancy rate among homeowners is 1 percent, for rental it’s 4.6 percent.
| HOUSING… |
Read the full article here
