Housing trends nationally and locally are shifting from single family homes to multi-unit housing , adapting to more childless couples, singles and single-parent households, writes Evan Brandt for mainlinemedianews.com.

Households headed by married parents dropped from 25 million to 23.7 million between 1980 and 2017.

During the same period, singles with no children rose by 93 percent from 18.3 million to 35.3 million.

Married couples with no children, including empty-nesters, rose 54 percent from 24.1 million to 37.1 million.

As a result, developers are building more and more multi-unit housing in the area, according to a study by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission presented during a Dec. 7 meeting of the Pottstown Metropolitan Area Regional Planning Commission.

The number of multi-family housing units built in the nine-county region went from 119 in 1993 to 5,756 in 2017, a 5,000 percent increase.

Montgomery County is home to 49,351 multi-unit rentals, second only to Philadelphia.

It accounts for 79 percent of all multi-housing permits for the four suburban counties between 2016 and 2018.

The towns with the most are Upper Merion (4,803); Cheltenham (4,599) and Lower Merion (3,590).

Read more about these regional housing trends here.

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