Less than 10% of new single-family homes were built in an older neighborhood on a site where a previous structure had to be torn down and rebuilt in 2021, according to the Builder Practices Survey (BPS) conducted by the Home Innovation Research Labs. Approximately 18.5% of homes were built on an infill lot in an older neighborhood, according to the BPS.
There is a moderate amount of geographic variation in the share of teardown/rebuilds. At the high end, about one-in-five (20.1%) of single-family homes were built on a lot where a structure had to be torn down first in the Pacific division, followed at a distance by the three divisions on the East Coast: New England (13.6%), the Middle Atlantic (12.9%), and South Atlantic (11.4%). At the other end of the scale, fewer than 5% of new single-family homes represented teardowns in the Mountain (4.7%), West North Central (4.3%) and West South Central (3.8%) states.
Non-teardown infill development was most common in New England, where it accounted for 35.0 percent of the single-family homes built in 2021. Non-teardown infill development also accounted for more than one-fifth of new single-family homes in the Pacific (27.5%), Mountain (22.6%) and Middle Atlantic (20.9%) Census divisions. At the low end of the scale, only 11.5% of new single-family homes were built on infill lots in the West South Central.
Although building new homes in new neighborhoods is the most common occurrence, teardown construction has taken on increased importance, because of the problems that builders have had in obtaining new lots in some parts of the country
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