I work at Rebuilding Together, a nonprofit which specializes in providing repairs and renovations to low income homeowners. For a while, we've been working with an internal fact sheet which depicts the estimated growth in the number of low income homeowners from 22.9 million in 2008 to 25.8 million in 2010. However, the person who worked out this estimate is no longer working with us and left no instructions or methodology behind how they found this number. They only wrote that they used ACS data based on an average household size of 2.68 people with a combined income below $44,700 as qualifying as low income. Does anyone have an idea of how I could work out the calculation that would yield this estimate? Beyond wanting to figure out if this number has any mathematical validity, we would like a reliable formula to use for making estimates about the change in number of low income households for administrative purposes.
Hi Alex - Table B25118 in the ACS shows the number of households (which is the same thing as the number of house-holders) by income level for both owner and renter householders. In short, the top part of the table, "owner-occupied" is a fairly good approximation of the number of "home owners" by income level.* My understanding, from your question, is that you'd just add up all of the households (householders) in that owner-occupied category under a given income threshold. (Doing that, I get about 26.7 million home owners with income $49,999 or lower in the 2014 5-year survey.) factfinder.census.gov/.../B25118 You do not need to (and should not!) adjust for household size. These counts are per household, not per person. *Owner occupied is not EXACTLY the same thing as home ownership. Someone could own a home, but be living/renting somewhere else at the time of the survey... but owner-occupied is about as good an approximation as you'll get to ownership in a survey. So that's probably a finer point than you need to worry about for this project!