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Description

VACANCY identifies vacant housing units and reports the reason for the vacancy (e.g., for rent, for sale, used only seasonally). To be counted as "vacant," a unit has to be in livable condition and intended for residential use. For newly-constructed units, all exterior windows and doors must be installed, and usable floors must be in place. Dilapidated, condemned, and nonresidential buildings are thus excluded. Mobile homes and trailers (in 1970 and 1980) were counted only if they were intended for occupancy where they stood (i.e., they were not still in a factory or retailer's sales lot). Enumerators obtained vacancy information from landlords, owners, neighbors, or anyone else who might have known about the unit's status; in 1970, they could rely on personal inspection.

User Caution: By default, the extraction system rectangularizes the data: that is, it puts household information on the person records and does not retain the households as separate records. As a result, rectangular files will not contain vacant units, since there are no persons corresponding to these units. Researchers wishing to retain vacant units should instead choose a hierarchical file format when creating their extract.