Last Fall, I wrote a post about the number of people per day moving to Durham. It turns out that if you look at the MSA or the county, the net migration into Durham (when you leave out births and deaths and account for people coming and leaving) is 11.5 people per day, less than the 20 people per day that I always hear quoted. I took this approach because I wanted to focus solely on the people moving here from other places.

In my post, I just presented the data as I calculated it from the American Community Survey (ACS data). I did not frame it as "look, people aren't moving here as fast as we thought, so the housing crunch must not be as bad as we thought". I fear that some people might have taken it that way, however, so I wanted to first present one other piece of data: housing inventory.

I took a look at the number of housing units as reported by the American Community Survey from 2016 to 2017 (the same years I used for population growth estimates). The ACS breaks d…