Overview
The AHS contains a wide variety of information that can be used by professional in many fields for planning, decision making, market research, or various kinds of program development. It provides data on apartments, single-family homes, mobile homes, vacant homes, family composition, income, housing and neighborhood quality, housing costs, equipment, fuels, size of housing unit, and recent movers.
The AHS survey has two distinguishing features. Unlike most surveys, the primary focus is on the housing unit; the survey does gather extensive information on the people living in the housing units, but only to relate the people characteristics to the housing characteristics. The AHS uses a longitudinal sample, which means that the Census Bureau goes back to the same housing unit with each new survey. This longitudinal feature allows HUD and the Census Bureau to see how housing units and people served in those units change over time.
Read more about this topic: American Housing Survey