AHS 2011 Public Use File Now Available for Download

I am pleased to announce that the 2011 American Housing Survey Public Use File (AHS PUF) is available for download from HUD USER, https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahs.html.

The current release also includes the descriptive statistics archive, which gives you a complete listing of the new variables, basic frequencies and statistics, and comparisons with the 2009 survey. The file flattener program, for those of you who like to use it, is also available. We don’t have the updated codebook yet. It will be posted as soon as it is ready. In its absence, we have posted a temporary file explaining the changes in the variables since the 2009 survey.

The Census Bureau’s web site will, within a day or two, post the standard AHS tabulations in Excel spreadsheet format. Our web site has a preliminary version of the tables.

The 2011 AHS features many changes. The one that will strike data users first is that the files are a lot bigger. That’s because, for the first time, AHS national and metropolitan survey cases are integrated into the same dataset. Not only, that, but the 2011 data collection included a whopping 29 metropolitan surveys, at 4500 cases each! Thus, the core NEWHOUSE file contains 186,448 records, and the PERSON file has 339,453. The standard weighting variables (WEIGHT and WGT90GEO) allow you to use all of the metropolitan cases in your national-level analysis. There is also a new weight variable, WGTMETRO, which allows you to tabulate the metropolitan areas on their own.

Here are a few other major changes that you will want to look out for:

• The mortgage module has been extensively revised, with many questions intended to capture the new types of mortgages now available.

• The 2011 survey included two special topical modules, on healthy homes and on accessibility features. The data from these modules are integrated into the current file structure, primarily NEWHOUSE.

• An important coding change you will want to note is that the variables referring to “check all that apply” items, which were formerly coded as “X” or blank, are now coded as “1” for checked and “2” for not checked.

• The AHS no longer includes commuting questions, and so the JTW (journey to work) module is gone.

• Many of the neighborhood questions have been dropped from the survey. Our plan is that some of these will return in 2013, in the form of GIS-based land use variables.

Dav Vandenbroucke
Senior Economist
U.S. Dept. HUD
david.a.vandenbroucke@hud.gov
202-402-5890