All datasets

New Privately-Owned Housing Units Started: Total Units

As provided by the Census, start occurs when excavation begins for the footings or foundation of a building. All housing units in a multifamily building are defined as being started when this excavation begins. Beginning with data for September 1992, estimates of housing starts include units in structures being totally rebuilt on an existing foundation.

Source: FRED (St. Louis Fed)812 rowsUpdated: 9/21/2026
housingfred

Quality

100

Attribution

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED)

Schema

ColumnTypeDescription
datestring
valuefloat

Sample rows

datevalue
1959-01-011657
1959-02-011667
1959-03-011620
1959-04-011590
1959-05-011498

Use with an LLM

Point any LLM at the metadata endpoint — the documentation above is machine-readable too (JSON-LD + Croissant).

cURL

curl "https://datazimuts.com/v1/datasets/fred/housing_starts" | jq '{title, rows, columns_count, license}'

Python

import requests

ds = requests.get("https://datazimuts.com/v1/datasets/fred/housing_starts").json()
print(ds["title"], ds["rows"], "rows")

# Sample rows for an LLM context window
for row in ds.get("sample_rows", [])[:5]:
    print(row)

API endpoint: https://datazimuts.com/v1/datasets/fred/housing_starts

Tip: fetch /llms.txt for the full machine-readable catalog.