New Jersey Housing Age by Town

But the range runs from 1938 or earlier to 2004 — which is why the age of the housing decides more about a wood floor here than any regional average can tell you.

Key facts

Why housing age is the number that matters for a wood floor

It predicts the species, the board width, the subfloor, the finish history and whether lead-safe rules apply — five things that decide how a floor is worked on.

A house built before 1940 is likely to have narrow original boards, possibly heart pine, possibly parquet, and to have been refinished more than once already. What is left of the wear layer is the first question, not the last.

A postwar house is likely to have red oak strip over a wood subfloor, which is the straightforward case. A house built after 1990 is more likely to have engineered or prefinished flooring, where the veneer thickness limits what sanding can do.

None of that is visible from a photograph of a room. It is visible from the year the house was built.

The spread is the point

Two New Jersey towns twenty minutes apart can sit on opposite sides of every one of these thresholds.

Montclair and Maplewood are majority pre-1940. Chesterfield and Upper Freehold are majority post-2000. They are in the same state, under the same building code, in the same climate zone.

This is why we publish the figure per municipality rather than per county or per region. A regional average describes no actual town.

What the derived tiers mean

era_tier, lead_risk and market_tier are classifications we compute from the Census values and use ourselves to decide how a job is approached.

era_tier sorts towns by dominant construction period: historic, prewar_mix, postwar, modern, recent. It maps to what is likely under the finish.

lead_risk flags how much of the stock predates 1978, which is the threshold for the EPA lead-safe rule.

market_tier is simply size by housing units. They are derived, not measured — the underlying data is the Census figures in the same row.

Housing age, by municipality

Showing the first 40 of 185 rows. The complete dataset is in the downloads above.

Download the data

Free to use and redistribute with attribution, under CC BY 4.0.

• nj-housing-age-by-town.csv — 17.4 KB
• nj-housing-age-by-town.json — 70.4 KB

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Please credit VGJ Floors Covering and link back to this page.

Method and limitations

US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2023 5-Year Estimates, tables B01003, B25001, B25034, B25035

• pct_pre_1978 is an ESTIMATE. The Census reports a 1970-1979 bracket rather than a 1978 cut; 80% of that bracket (8 of 10 years) is attributed to the pre-1978 period and added to the older brackets.
• pct_pre_1940 is exact: the B25034 bracket is '1939 or earlier'.
• median_home_year is bottom-coded by the Census at 1938, meaning '1938 or earlier'. Rows where this applies are flagged in median_year_is_bottom_coded.
• era_tier, lead_risk and market_tier are deterministic classifications derived from the Census values, not separate measurements.

Frequently asked questions