We follow crashes into commercial buildings, and we are focused on incidents occurring in the United States (with Canada also in our sights) but this article caught our eye as being an obvious response to an obvious problem -- and South Florida homeowners (and home buyers) should take take note! See the Australian report HERE.
While we work hard to document, research, and share our statistics on storefront and related crashes (see our updated statistics HERE) we do come across a huge number of crashes into residential buildings, be they homes or apartments, single family or multifamily. From a purely anecdotal perspective, we observe MORE reports of crashes into residential structures in the United States than we do commercial/municipal/public buildings. And again while we have not quantified it, since we observe that there may be as many as 20,000 crashes into commercial buildings every year in the United States, it is clearly a number that is many times larger than that.
Which makes sense -- by some counts there are as many as 150 million residential housing units in the US, and while many of them are apartments and condominiums remote from roads or parking areas, most are not....and that is just more fixed targets to be struck by wayward drivers or out of control cars. I pulled some figures on number of structures together and pasted them below.
So back to the headline -- since drivers in South Florida seem to run into structures of all kinds at a greater rate than in other parts of the country, are home prices being affected by the media attention from incidents where cars come crashing through them? If not yet, is that day coming? We'll keep an eye on the problem for you.
Buildings and their Impact on the Environment: A Statistical Summary
Revised April 22, 2009
1 Residential Buildings • Nearly 128 million residential housing units existed in the U.S. in 2007. (2) Approximately 7.188 million new housing units were built between 2005 and 2009.(3)
2 Commercial Buildings • Nearly 4.9 million office buildings existed in 2003 in the U.S.(4) Every year, approximately 170,000 commercial buildings are constructed, and nearly 44,000 commercial buildings demolished (1995).(5)
sources
1 2002 Economic Census. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce. http://www.census.gov/econ/census02/advance/TABLE2.HTM
2 American Housing Survey for the United States- 2007. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and U.S. Department of Commerce. September 2008.
3 Ibid.
4http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cbecs2003/introduction.html. 2003 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey—Overview of Commercial Buildings Characteristics. Energy Information Administration.
5 C-Series Reports. Manufacturing and Construction Division, Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce. 1995.