Every Home Owner & Renter in America

There have been a few maps recently which have tried to show the best places to rent or buy in the United States by comparing the cost of renting and the cost of buying in an area. Another indicator might be to look at where people are already renting and buying properties. For that job you need the Owners vs Renters map.

Owners vs Renters is an interactive dot map showing every single home owner and renter in the United States. It uses data from the 2010 US Census. For reasons of personal privacy data is randomized within each block. This means that you can't tell the areas within your immediate neighborhood where people are renting or owning. However the map is very effective at the city level, revealing the neighborhoods with a mixture of renters and owners, the neighborhoods where most people own their homes and the neighborhoods with a majority or renters.


Owners vs Renters is particularly effective in dense urban areas. Zoom in on any major city center and you can quickly see where home owners tend to live and where lots of people rent. There could be many historical and/or social reasons why particularly blocks have a mix of owners or renters or a predominance of either owners or renters. For example, you might find it interesting to compare the Owners vs Renters dot map with the Racial Dot Map of America.

You can learn more about how the map was made with Mapbox and Tippecanoe on this blog post, Renters and Owners — Visualizing every person in the US.