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It's not clear that they demonstrated causality here; I would guess that the explanation is a 'dreaded third thing'. Homelessness tends to be most concentrated
by nickff 5y ago
It's not clear that they demonstrated causality here; I would guess that the explanation is a 'dreaded third thing'. Homelessness tends to be most concentrated in rich coastal cities; the desirability and wealth also happen to cause high rents (especially relative to earnings).
One of the chart captions says "Homelessness climbs faster when rent affordability reaches 22% and 32% thresholds", but they don't seem to have actually found data that demonstrated this was a temporal (rather than a geographic) effect.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wallacoloo 5y agoi’m also worried about how they calculate this rent-to-income ratio. > Monroe County in Florida, where the median market rate rent consumes 62.9 percent of the area’s median household income. at this point, if they’re using the IRS definition of “household”, they’re probably overestimating how much each household pays on rent. as rent per sqft rises there’s a competing effect whereby more people of different tax households pool their income and collectively rent just one unit. e.g. median IRS household income is $100,000. median house rent is $60,000/yr. 4 unrelated people each making the median income choose to share that roof. the median share of income going to rent in this case is 15% — not the 60% that could be calculated if you compared median unit rent directly to median IRS household income. the methodology seems pretty important and should be touched on, otherwise it’s easy for the reader to misinterpret what these numbers actually mean.