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> Accounting for housing costs, California has nation’s highest poverty rate I assume that the underlying study breaks the population down into quintiles or de
by curtis 8y ago
> Accounting for housing costs, California has nation’s highest poverty rate
I assume that the underlying study breaks the population down into quintiles or deciles based on income and then looks at spending on housing for each group, but it's not clear from the article.
If you simply compare average income to average housing costs you're going to get a skewed result. A software engineer living in the Bay Area could be well over the national average for housing (40% or 50% of income, maybe more in some cases) but they're definitely not contributing to an increased poverty level.
Another way of looking at this is that California's poorest counties are in the Central Valley. I suspect this is also where California's cheapest real estate is at.
- lucb1e 8y agoGood point. To elaborate on it: > If you simply compare average income to average housing costs you're going to get a skewed result. Particularly because averages give skewed results given outliers, which there surely must be. (Particularly with wages, I imagine, someone can be hugely overpaid (like 1M vs. 100k), but you can hardly be 900k underpaid because then you'd be making negative money.) The median value makes more sense when one does not want to be affected as much by outliers. Not that comparing the median housing price to the median income is necessarily a correct or complete view; I just noticed that we're talking about averages which are even worse for this purpose.
- dmode 8y agoThis is exactly right. A statewide housing adjustment doesn't make any sense. Bay Area housing cost doesn't impact the poorest regions of the state which are in Mojave desert, Sierra Nevada foothills, far north towards Oregon border