Estimating the Number of Low Income Homeowners

One more thing to consider...
Your inquiry was for "low income" home owners, and you mentioned the $44,700 dollar-value threshold. If what you're looking for is the number of households with income below a certain threshold, the table I mentioned (B25118) should work.

According to HUD, the "low income" threshold in 2008 for a family* of 3 was 44,300 and in 2014 was 46,000. (See: www.huduser.gov/.../FY08_StateIncomeLimits.pdf for 2008 thresholds and www.huduser.gov/.../State_Incomelimits_Report.pdf for 2014 thresholds. The US values are at the bottom of each report.)

If, instead, you are looking for "low income" defined by ratio of income to poverty level, then you will need to use the ACS microdata. The easiest way to do that is to use the IPUMS system usa.ipums.org/.../index.shtml. You will need a log-in, but it's free. The IPUMS "Analyze Data Online" tool you to query the microdata to create any crosstabulation you might need.

Feel free to send me a direct message if you want to discuss this further.
Good luck!

*HUD thresholds are for family income, while ACS published tables are for household income. It sounds like your predecessor used household income, but that might not be the most precise option. You may want to use the IPUMS system to get family data -- again, send me a direct message and we can discuss the nuances further.

One more thing to consider...
Your inquiry was for "low income" home owners, and you mentioned the $44,700 dollar-value threshold. If what you're looking for is the number of households with income below a certain threshold, the table I mentioned (B25118) should work.

According to HUD, the "low income" threshold in 2008 for a family* of 3 was 44,300 and in 2014 was 46,000. (See: www.huduser.gov/.../FY08_StateIncomeLimits.pdf for 2008 thresholds and www.huduser.gov/.../State_Incomelimits_Report.pdf for 2014 thresholds. The US values are at the bottom of each report.)

If, instead, you are looking for "low income" defined by ratio of income to poverty level, then you will need to use the ACS microdata. The easiest way to do that is to use the IPUMS system usa.ipums.org/.../index.shtml. You will need a log-in, but it's free. The IPUMS "Analyze Data Online" tool you to query the microdata to create any crosstabulation you might need.

Feel free to send me a direct message if you want to discuss this further.
Good luck!

*HUD thresholds are for family income, while ACS published tables are for household income. It sounds like your predecessor used household income, but that might not be the most precise option. You may want to use the IPUMS system to get family data -- again, send me a direct message and we can discuss the nuances further.

Just to repeat. HUD uses a concept called Area Median Income (which is household based). The income limits are by hh size. The data are available in HUDuser.org. Low income is 80% or less of AMI, Very Low income is 50% of AMI, and Extremely Low Income is 30% of AMI. They are here:
www.huduser.gov/.../il.html

The CHAS Tables which tabulate the number of households by a variety of categories are here:
www.huduser.gov/.../data_querytool_chas.html

They are special tabulations done by the Census Bureau for HUD and based upon ACS.

This is the "official definition" of low income.

Andy

This is definitely helpful for our work, thanks!. However, what my manager is primarily interested in is how someone took data from 2008 and used it to estimate the low income homeowner rate in 2010. I was thinking they used some form of linear extrapolation using the rate of change over previous years, or something along those lines. Do you know if there's a way to do that that's professionally supported? If not, we'll probably just abandon that notion and use either your methodology or switch to using an AMI measurement.

Thanks Andrew! The CHAS tables look especially helpful. However, I would like to find information similar to those tables, with the breakdowns of 30%, 50%, and 80% of AMI, but over just a 1 year time frame instead of 4 years. Do you know of any cite I could find that data at?

Alex

I used the IPUMS web site cited by Beth to try to generate your 2010 figure.

Using the 2010 ACS data set (ie 1 year data), I recoded the household income variable (hhincome) into two categories, one less than $44,700 and one $44,700 or greater. I than ran a frequency analysis for the nation limited to owner occupied units (ownershp=1), excluding all group quarters (gptype = 0) and counting only the first household member (pernum = 1). The result is 25,747,355 households who live in owner occupied housing units and whose annual income is less than $44,700, which rounds up 25.8 million owner occupied households in 2010 with an income below $44,700.

I have not tried the analysis for 2008 but I'll bet you will get a match.

Cliff Cook