Home Buying

A quick look at how Bostonians live

Boston shares a lot in common with other East Coast cities when it comes to housing.

Boston shares a lot in common with other East Coast cities when it comes to housing. Craig F. Walker / Globe Staff

September 21, 2015

1 minute to read

Boston may share some cultural similarities to San Francisco, or see a familiar burgeoning tech scene like Austin, Texas, but when it comes to how and where residents live, Boston is definitely an East Coast city.

The newly released 2014 American Community Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that Bostonians, like people in Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and Washington D.C., are unlikely to live in standalone single-family homes.

That may seem natural to East Coast urbanites, but it is not the norm.

As The Washington Post reports, the detached, single-family home is actually the most common urban living arrangement nationwide, even in some pretty large cities, like San Diego, Denver, and Charlotte, North Carolina.

The latest census data estimates there are 274,459 total housing units in Boston, subsequently breaking it down by the number of units in each structure.

Here is the percentage of Boston residents that lives in each type of structure:

– 1-unit, detached: 12.2 percent

– 1-unit, attached (i.e., rowhouses): 6.7 percent

– 2 units: 12.4 percent

– 3 or 4 units: 24.1 percent

– 5 to 9 units: 12.3 percent

– 10 to 19 units: 8.1 percent

– 20 or more units: 24.0 percent

– Mobile home: 0.2 percent

– Boat, RV, van, etc.: 0.1 percent

The survey reports that only 34.9 percent of all occupied Boston units are owner occupied, while 65.1 percent house renters.

And almost 50 percent of the people occupying these units began living there in 2010 or later – probably a consequence of Boston’s notoriously migratory population of student renters.