City staff correct multifamily count, say Denton added roughly 16,600 rental units since 2020

Haley Zgierski, assistant planning director for the City of Denton, told the Planning & Zoning Commission on Feb. 12 that staff had discovered a data error affecting the city’s multifamily unit counts and has replaced the flawed dataset with one from CoStar.

Zgierski said the county appraisal data originally used for the 2020 multifamily baseline had been paired incorrectly with the city’s GIS, and items that did not match on address or complex name were dropped. Staff now uses CoStar for the multifamily inventory and reports a 2020 multifamily count of 17,459 units rather than the 4,550 figure the presentation previously used; the corrected series shows about 22,000 multifamily units in 2023.

The error affected only the multifamily baseline, Zgierski said, and not single-family counts, rental rates or other measures. Using the corrected counts, staff estimated about 4,000 multifamily units under construction and about 8,000 in various stages of review, adding roughly 16,672 multifamily units since 2020 — a 96% increase from the comp…