The commonly reported statistic asks, what percentage of adults live in homes owned by a resident, rather than rent? That's been steady in the mid-60 percentages for decades.

This new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis offers another statistic for consideration: the ratio of homeowners to the adult population.

The main categories of people who differ in this proposed methodology:

• People who live in group home settings that do not ordinarily count as renters, like dorms, nursing homes, and prisons, are now included in the denominator (and not considered homeowners). Previously, these didn't count towards the ratio in either the numerator or denominator.
• Adult family members of homeowners who do not pay rent (adult children, parents of an owner, etc.), or adult roommates paying for a room. This turns out to be about 13.9% of the population.

Most importantly, these are unevenly distributed by geographical region, age, other demographics. Not all of these are bad (nothing wrong with multi-generation living arrangements), but they can show trends across time or place, and pick up less noticeable trends in people's living situations more broadly.

Yeah, now factor in what percentage of those homes are actually owned by the bank.

Because Blackstone owns them all, now.

Who owns the rest of the houses?

The ratio of home ownership probably looks closer to the distribution of the demographics of congress than that of America.

Now let’s get numbers for USians under 50, and USians who make under the median income. 53% is still too high.

Cowards.

The traditional homeownership rate, tracked by the U.S. Census Bureau, measures the share of occupied homes in which the owner lives. The new measure from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, called the homeowners-to-population ratio, or HPOP, instead calculates the share of adults who own a home.

For any Canadians reading, this almost certainly applies to us as well as we determine the home ownership rate in the same flawed way. It misses all sorts of living situations such as adult children living with parents, people renting a room, people renting non-legal suites in a house where the other half is occupied by the owner, etc.

Why do they have to research this? Just ask people.

Yeah 53% is likely incorrect as well. Census "data" is objectively bad for meaningful information.