Fed Researchers Offer a New Homeownership Metric—and It Drops the Rate to 53%

The Federal Reserve of Minneapolis has proposed a new way of measuring homeownership that would change the current view of the housing landscape.In a paper released earlier this month, researchers suggested that homeownership in America should be measured not by the share of homes where the owner is a resident, often called owner occupancy.Its alternative is to measure the share of adult population that owns their homes, which it called the "homeowners-to-population" (HPOP) ratio.The change might seem nuanced, but it leads to a major shift: While 65% of homes are owner-occupied, just 53% of U.S. adults own a home.The Minneapolis Fed's new methodology excludes from the homeownership count the people who live in the home but don't own the home directly—for example, the homeowners' parents and adult children.The previous methodology considers everyone in the family to be owner-occupants. Under both scenarios, rental units and their tenants are not owner-occupants.Researchers said in the paper that their new methodology "puts people first" and offers a more nuanced view of homeownership. It also excludes 13.9% of adults who live in owner-occupied homes they don't personally own."By inc...