This tweet was posted a few days ago:
Half of U.S. homeowners and renters (49.9%) sometimes, regularly or greatly struggle to afford their housing payments—and many are making big sacrifices to cover their costs, per Redfin and Axios: pic.twitter.com/pFLPhLuOEl
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) April 15, 2024
Matt Darling reposted it but then added:
These numbers are also, fwiw, clearly wrong. 22% of Americans are not skipping meals to afford housing. That's massively above the USDA estimate of food insecurity.
This reminds me: the world is brimming with bad data from companies who use quickie surveys and clickbait toplines to get free PR. In this case, Redfin got Axios to bite, but they're hardly uniquely gullible. The Wall Street Journal publishes this junk all the time.
There's no hope of getting this to stop as long as media outlets remain eager consumers. So do yourself a favor and take a quick look at the source when you see charts like this. Reliability goes approximately in this order:
- National statistical agencies in reliable countries (i.e., not China).
- Well regarded international statistical agencies (OECD, World Bank, etc.)
- Academic research (but make sure you understand it).
- Well known pollsters (Gallup, YouGov).
- Commercial outfits that do consistent releases (Zillow, for example, or NAR).
- Commercial outfits that do research periodically on different subjects (McKinsey, for example, or Microsoft).
- Companies that sporadically release clickbait survey results.
- Dotcom companies.
The top five are mostly usable without a lot of skepticism. The bottom three should only be used if you dive deeper and decide the particular bit of research being touted seems to have been reasonably produced. One-off polls from people who aren't experienced with surveys very often suffer from poor design, bad question wording, and massive conflict of interest.
then there's rasmussen et al
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More clickbait:
550 U.S. cities! That sounds like a lot. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that 238 of those "million-dollar cities" are part of the three cities we know as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Amazing!
(Very few of those million-dollar homes look anything like the one in the picture accompanying the article.)
hard to believe the outlet that spawned maria bartiromo and rick santelli might not be completely on the up and up
You could blame Zillow, which originally published the claim. But business & other pubs have faithfully picked up the story and passed along the hype, including:
CNBC
Fortune
QZ
Yahoo Finance
Marketplace
The Hill
Even before the internet, media incentives skewed toward hyperbole. Now that everything is online, the temptations are too great to resist.
Right. There have to be at least 30,000 incorporated municipalities ("cities") in the United States. That two percent of them feature million dollar home prices isn't much to write home about.
Redfin commissioned Qualtrics to perform the survey. The study included nearly 3000 homeowners and renters.
I see no reason to doubt the accuracy of the data. The interpretation of the data is debatable.
Food insecurity isn't the same thing as skipping meals.
Exactly. Food insecurity is about lack of access to sufficient, quality food. Skipping some meals in order to afford your mortgage has absolutely nothing to do with food insecurity. These people, presumably, have access to food, they are choosing to skip these meals for financial reasons.
Yeah, going back to the orignal data the 22% who skipped a meal isn't based on all 3000 respondents. It's based on the respondents who reported that they struggled to pay for housing. Which was about half of the 3000 respondents. So that's a food insecurity rate of about 11% which is pretty close to the latest USDA figure (12.8% in 2022).
Sloppy work Kevin...
https://www.redfin.com/news/homebuying-sacrifices-survey-2024/
What is the home ownership rate among the people who are considered food insecure by the USDA? I suspect very low, so those people are probably not responsible for the response about skipping meals.
People don't always tell the truth in response to polls and they like to complain. If the questions are posed in a political context biases can be tremendous. Absolute percentages in polls may often be suspect for various reasons - trends are more likely to have meaning. It may be very difficult to pose questions that will give truthful and accurate answers. Just trusting the result of a random poll is foolish.
The survey included renters as well as home owners.
@emh1969
Quite right. It was 22% of those who say they struggle, not 22% of all respondents.
“redfin site:jabberwocking.com”
And/or
“redfin drum site:mitherjones.com”
Into your search engine of choice.
The truth is more than 22 percent should skip meals for the sake of their health, if not for their wallet.
If Americans are "skipping meals", it's because they're on "Oh! Oh! Oh!! OZEMPIC!!"
That may be true, but it's also the case that roughly 25% of all Americans are Medicaid recipients (85,094,448 (Dec 2023 via Medicaid) divided by 335,893,238 (Dec 2023 via Census) = 25.3%).
I always treasure this gem from Pew:
Pew uses this anecdote to illustrate the unreliability of opt-in polling. But they studiously avoid considering an explanation with more serious implications for all public opinion surveys: that the proportion of the population willing to respond to cold calls from unknown numbers has become so small that any polling sample is inherently unrepresentative of the population. Like the respondents who claimed they were licensed to operate a nuclear submarine, a non-negligible number may well welcome participation in a poll as an opportunity to play silly games with the pollster.