Where Are Vacation Homes Located in the US?

Summary

As of 2023, the US has around 142.3 million housing units: roughly one home for every 2.4 people in the country. The vast majority of these homes – 127.5 million – are occupied. The remaining 14.8 million homes are vacant. Of these, around 4.8 million homes, or around 3.5% of the total, are vacant because they’re seasonal, or vacation, homes.I’ve spent a lot of time writing about patterns of housing and home construction in the US, but virtually none of it has been looking at vacation homes specifically. I wanted to better understand patterns in the distribution of vacation homes in the US, for a few different reasons:It tells us about patterns of recreation in the US: where are the popular vacation spots?It tells us about patterns of elite consumption in the US: where do people who can afford it have second homes?It points us to places that might have unique housing challenges due to very high demand from vacationers and tourists.To look at US vacation homes, I used Census data, which tracks (to varying degrees of success, depending on the census year) the number of seasonal homes in the US going back to the 1940s.The map below shows vacation homes in the US by state.Florida leads the pack with over 800k vacation homes, followed by California at 360k and New York at 309k. Michigan (at 260k) and Texas (at 201k) round out the top five. At the bottom of the list, you have several Great Plains states: Kansas at 12.9k, South Dakota at 13.7k, and North Dakota at 11.6k.There’s a few interesting patterns observable on this map — the dominance of Florida, the relative popularity of Midwest states like Michican and Wisconsin as a place for vacation homes, the fact that Alaska has nearly as many vacation homes as Hawaii — but to a large extent this map is a population map. 4 of the top 5 states for vacation homes are also in the top 5 by overall population (only Michigan breaks this trend, coming in at number 10 in overall population). To account for this, we can look at the ...