Room Enough: METHODOLOGY: HOUSING UNITS REQUIRED BY 2020

HOUSEHOLD POPULATION
Household population refers to the number of people living in dwelling units and excludes those individuals living in group quarters. Therefore, the raw population numbers are larger and include prison population, group military population and other institutional living. Whereas the raw population for Monterey County in year 2000 was 401,762, the household population was 380,786.

The household population of 380,786 was divided by the number of existing housing units in both the unincorporated and incorporated areas of Monterey County to obtain the average number of persons per household. Thus household population (380,762) was divided by the number of households (121,236) to obtain the average number of persons per household, or 3.14.

The 2020 household population increase forecast for the County was divided by the existing 2000 average persons-per-household number to determine the number of new housing units required (40,092). It should be noted that AMBAG, in its Jobs Housing Study of 2001 predicted a need for 42,864 housing units by 2020; while we believe the need to be somewhat lower, we note that our study shows that the higher number would easily be accommodated.

ADDITIONAL HOUSING UNITS REQUIRED BY 2020
Applying the methodology described above, the study applied the existing County-wide household average of 3.14 to the forecast household population in 2020. The steps required are demonstrated in the table on the following page.

TABLE 1. CALCULATION OF DWELLING UNITS REQUIRED TO MEET 2020 HOUSEHOLD POPULATION FORECAST.