Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pseudo0 695 days ago
In case you weren't aware:

> 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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_...

1 comments

To add to what you said, and make it a little easier to visualise why it's misleading:

If you have one person living on their own in a house they own, and four people renting bedrooms in a shared house, the home ownership rate is 50% despite only 20% (1 of the 5) of the people being home owners.

If the home owner then rents out one of their bedrooms to someone expanding the population between the two houses from 5 to 6, then home ownership rate is still 50% but now it's 16.6% (1 in 6) of people who own a home.