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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Or if you venture outside of major cities there is also plenty of affordable housing in unfashionable suburban. Many of those areas also have low crime and decent public schools. Not much public transportation, but plenty of free parking.

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Define affordable. My nearest town has a population of 500 or so and my home’s price has at least doubled in the last 10 years.

Absolute prices are irrelevant. Affordability is reflected in home ownership rates. In some states such as Alabama, Maine, Minnesota, Vermont, South Carolina, etc. the rates are above 70%. Regular people seem to be finding it affordable.

https://www.propertyshark.com/info/us-homeownership-rates-by...

How does a person becoming homeless effect the homeownership rate? They no longer get counted.

How does someone owning (and living in) multiple properties effect the homeownership rate? They count multiple times!

How does someone renting out a bedroom effect the homeownership rate? Their tenant doesn't count! This includes adult children.

You can not use this metric in the way that you just assumed you could.

Wrong. Instead of lying you should take a few minutes to understand how the rate is actually calculated.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOWNRATEACS006085

Surely one of us is confused, but I am not lying. Here it is on the Census website. No where does the Homeownership rate depend on people. It depends on housing units.

> Housing Unit. A housing unit is a house, an apartment, a group of rooms, or a single room occupied or intended for occupancy as separate living quarters.

> Homeownership Rates. The proportion of households that are owners is termed the homeownership rate. It is computed by dividing the number of households that are owners by the total number of occupied households.

> https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/definitions.pdf

When we get to the bottom of this we should edit the Wikipedia article if I am wrong.

> The name "homeownership rate" can be misleading. As defined by the US Census Bureau, it is the percentage of homes that are occupied by the owner. It is not the percentage of adults that own their own home. This latter percentage will be significantly lower than the homeownership rate. Many households that are owner-occupied contain adult relatives (often young adults, descendants of the owner) who do not own their own home. Single building multi-bedroom rental units can contain more than one adult, all of whom do not own a home.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_St...

You are lying to claim that homeless people aren't included. They are in the denominator as part of the total estimated population.

You are confused. The denominator is the number of households. The homeless obviously don’t have households.

You could at least read the comment you’re replying to before calling its poster a liar.

You are confused. The denominator includes the total estimated population. You could at least read the official definition before wasting everyone's time.

Here is the definition, from the first paragraph of the source that you yourself posted[1]:

  The United States homeownership rate represents the percentage of occupied housing units where the resident is also the owner. A constantly evolving figure, the United States homeownership rate currently rests at 65.2%, while renter-occupied housing units make up 34.8% of the national stock.

From this definition it trivially follows that a rented property becoming vacant increases the homeownership rate, because the vacant property (and the person who was renting) will both no longer be counted, at all and thus the total percentage of owner occupied units will increase.

At this point I'm not sure if you failed to read your own link, don't understand what "percentage of" means, or are just obstinately wrong, but regardless it doesn't much seem worth continuing does it?

[1] https://www.propertyshark.com/info/us-homeownership-rates-by...

The Census breaks the homeless population into two groups - those whom live in shelters and those who do not. They completely ignore the later. For the former, shelters are not considered housing units.

> "Census Bureau surveys do not collect data on the population experiencing homelessness and living on the streets"

> https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2024/demo/seh...

Delinquent debt is at the same levels will into the GFC starting in 2008. More like they are maxing out their debt and then ignoring the calls to repay them and the financial institutions are just delaying collection hoping this all blows over.

Mortgage delinquency rates are near record lows so what's your point?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRSFRMACBS

Delinquency Rate on Consumer Loans, All Commercial Banks (DRCLACBS) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRCLACBS Taking off like a rocket, people are strapped for cash and have been burning all their credit to survive. Mortgages are low for now, but once people run out of easy credit, which they have, mortgage delinquencies will rise. People are poor.

Hm, I think we may find chickens coming home to roost in the next recession perhaps. Obviously not because of variable rate mortgages, but we’ll find out if people stretched themselves too thin. I’m sure there are metrics about that as well but I think that’d be the best test.

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