Talk:Homeownership in the United States

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Expansion

This article is going to be expanded, but as I am currently busy with other projects this might take a short while ;-) Regards, Signature^brendel 21:42, 26 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Clarification Needed

These numbers appear to reflect how many people have mortgages and not the actual number of home "owners". You do not own a home until the full mortgage has been paid. I think many of us are looking for the number of people who really do own their own homes and not have mortgages. ;-) Regards, Signature^ssmith 21:42, 01 September 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.130.0.61 (talk) [reply]

I have been looking for information regarding really home owner I did not find any data at all. If somebody find something I would be amazing to post it on here or at the article. Regards signature

Chart

{{reqdiagram}} I added some historical data; it would be neat to make this into a bar or line graph. -- Beland 22:09, 17 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I will do so within the next couple of says, thanks for data. Regards, Signature^brendel 01:26, 19 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Statistics: what do they mean?

I actually sought out this article to find one number -- How many homeowners are there in the United States? I read the entire article and did not find this number, although I found lengthy analysis of the statistics of home ownership. The problem is that the statistics used focused almost exclusively on the ownership rate (percentage) of various population groups -- by age or marriage or ethnicity, for example, as well as comparing home ownership rates of various nations. While I certainly can see that this information is both useful and valuable, it did not satisfy my needs and I fail to believe I am so unique as to be the only person interested in raw numbers. Give me the data and I can calculate percentages. Give me percentages only and I have no idea what the base numbers were.

Since percentages are used exclusively in this article, this means that the author(s) of this piece either had the raw numbers and calculated the percentages or accepted someone else's calculations at face value. When statistics are provided that can be used to fashion socio-political agendas, I am like my grade school, middle school and high school math teachers who insisted we "show our work." If you use U.S. Census data as the basis for the article's statistics, you can find the raw numbers in the same data and incorporate it into the article. In doing so, you will give the article greater depth, utility and veracity. It will be far more valuable to some to know that x number Hispanics owned y number homes for an ownership rate of z percent than simply to know that z percent of Hispanics owned homes in the U.S. in a given year without any idea of how many Hispanics were counted to derive the percentile.

Rate of ownership, as the only reported statistic category, is undoubtedly valuable for some purposes but practically meaningless if someone simply wants to know the raw numbers -- how many homes are/were owned in the United States in a given year? It would also be valuable for some to know how many were primary residences, second/vacation homes, and investment/rental properties, but that might be more than the author(s) can provide. Jack.Keller (talk) 15:24, 2 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This may be unnecessarily suspicious. Percentage is a more useful metric because you can make comparisons over time and across groups, if you had the raw numbers you'd see that home ownership increased over time simply because population increased - not a very useful finding. Calculating percentages is, as you say, a trivial process, so I'm inclined to think that it's acceptable to refer to them, as long as they are referenced, without showing working. 203.217.150.69 (talk) 06:28, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I note also that the data is hosted on the census website, therefore unless you have some grounds for suspecting that the census data is incorrect or is being misrepresented here, I think the use of percentages makes more sense. 203.217.150.69 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 06:30, 2 June 2010 (UTC).[reply]