Survey shows society’s shifts as US adjusted to pandemic
During the first two years of the pandemic, the number of people working from home in the United States tripled, home values grew and the percentage of people who spent more than a third of their income on rent went up, according to survey results recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Providing the most detailed data to date on how life changed in the U.S. under COVID19, the bureau’s American Community Survey one-year estimates for 2021 showed that the share of unmarried couples living together rose, and the percentage of people who identify as multiracial grew significantly.
The data release offers the first reliable glimpse of life in the U.S. during the COVID-19 era, as the one-year estimates from the 2020 survey were deemed unusable because of problems getting people to answer during the early months of the pandemic. That left a one-year data gap during a time when the pandemic forced major changes in the way people live their lives.
The survey typically relies on responses from 3.5 million households to provide 11 billion estimates each year about commuting times, internet access, family life, income, education levels, disabilities, military service and employment. The estimates help inform how to distribute hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending.
Response rates significantly improved from 2020 to 2021, “so we are confident about the data for this year,” said Mark Asiala, the survey’s chief of statistical design.
While the percentage of married-couple households
stayed stable over the two years at around 47%, the percent of households with unwed couples cohabiting rose to 7.2% in 2021 from 6.6% in 2019. Contrary to pop culture images of multigenerational family members moving in together during the pandemic, the average household size contracted from 2.6 to 2.5 people.
People stayed put. More than 87% of those surveyed were living in the same house a year ago in 2021, compared to 86% in 2019. America became more wired as people became reliant on remote learning and working from home.
The jump in people who identify as multiracial — from 3.4% in 2019 to 12.6% in 2021 — and a decline in people identifying as white alone — from 72% to 61.2% — coincided with Census Bureau changes in coding race and Hispanic origin responses. Those adjustments were intended to capture more detailed write-in answers from participants. The period between surveys also overlapped with social justice protests following the killing of George Floyd, who was Black, by a white
Minneapolis police officer in 2020 as well as attacks against Asian Americans.
Experts say this likely led some multiracial people who previously might have identified as a single race to instead embrace all of their background.
Housing demand grew over the two years, as the percent of vacant homes dropped from 12.1% to 10.3%. The median value of homes rose from $240,500 to $281,400. The percent of people whose gross rent exceeded more than 30% of their income went from 48.5% to 51%.
Commutes to work dropped from 27.6 minutes to 25.6 minutes, as the percent of people working from home during a period of return-to-office starts and stops went from 5.7% in 2019 to almost 18% in 2021. Almost half of workers in the District of Columbia worked from home, the highest rate in the nation, while Mississippi had the lowest rate at 6.3% Over the two years, the percent of workers nationwide using public transportation to get to work went from 5% to 2.5%, as fears rose of catching the virus on buses and subways.