A tale of two headlines: UPDATED with corrections (after the jump)

Hey! Great news!

[Vermont] Housing affordability continues to improve: At record level in 2012

Oh no! Terrible news!

High Rents Make Housing Unaffordable for Many in Vermont

Huh. We seem to have a little puzzle on our hands.

The first headline comes to us courtesy of Vermont’s Most Overpaid Economist*, Art Woolf. His annual “analysis” shows that Vermont housing got more affordable in 2012 for the sixth year in a row.

*He’s got the balls to price his “Vermont Economy Newsletter” at $150 per year. I’ll stick with “Tiger Beat,” thanks.

The second headline comes from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which found that “Renters in Vermont need to earn $18.53 an hour in order to afford a basic apartment.”

And there’s the disconnect: Woolf is only interested in housing purchases, while the NLIHC focuses on rental housing, the only available outlet for many of the working poor.  

Note: Here’s where the Correction starts. Actually, a complete overhaul of the rest of this diary. In my original post, I confused “median” with “mean,” so my original point about Woolf’s bias is not accurate. (Thanks to commenter TomC for the correction.) However, his report remains extremely problematic.

What’s more, Woolf only considers families including a married couple filing jointly* — which leaves out many of the poor and working poor. The median income for a married couple is almost certainly a fair bit higher than the median income for all Vermonters. And in Vermont Business Magazine’s story on the Woolf study, he does not give a dollar figure for “median household income.” I wrongly assumed he meant $53,000, which is the statewide median income.

*Thanks to commenter Doug Hoffer for pointing this out.

Between those two problems, I’m not really sure if there’s a point to Woolf’s study. It’s extremely selective in a way that makes Vermont’s housing market look a lot more accessible than it really is. Either he doesn’t know how to appropriately design a real study, or he deliberately designed this one to provide a rosy picture.

Either possibility is quite disturbing, and makes me mistrust his punditry and his very expensive newsletter.  

8 thoughts on “A tale of two headlines: UPDATED with corrections (after the jump)

  1. it’s even worse

    Mr. Woolf did not use median household income. He used “the median income of married taxpayers filing joint returns.”

    That figure is about 50% higher than the median household income. By using only those who file as married filing jointly he conveniently narrows the universe to a more affluent segment of the population. Mr. Woolf has done this for years.

  2. JV – Headlines can be deceiving for sure, and Woolf has at times been very sloppy with his claims from the data he produces.  However, the Median is NOT skewed by the upper 1% making a ton of money; that would skew the Mean (average).  The definition of “Median” is that 50% of households fall above it (no matter how much above) and 50% below.  In the case of examining affordability, the Median is the right statistic to use.

    What he’s saying is that the median of “Married households filing jointly” (thanks, Doug!) has found housing more affordable now than 5 years ago.  I still think that’s good news.  Despite the headline, I doubt he’s claiming that this makes housing purchases “affordable” for the poor, as you seem to be indicating.  

  3. Is this:

    “Thanks to commenter Doug Hoffer”

    Hmm, Doug Hoffer.  I seem to recall hearing that name before, and I don’t think it was in the context of a commenter on GMD.  Now where have I heard that name…?

  4. in order to “prove” his ivory-towered thesis.  He always has been, as far back as I can remember.

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