Whaddaya mean, 'home'?
"You can't go home again," Thomas Wolfe wrote, but he didn't have geopositioning tools on his cell phone.
Chapter 1
Sorry about your luck, kids.
So the president of these United States, one Donald J. Trump, participated in a Cabinet meeting this week, at least until he got a bit sleepy. Before being "caught in a blink," Trump offered his assessment of housing prices.
"I don't want to drive housing prices down," he said — as seen in the admittedly off-putting animation above. "I want to drive housing prices up for people who own homes."
You don't need to be a stable genius to understand where the winners and losers are in this scenario. If you own a home — and particularly if you own a few, maybe one in Manhattan and one in West Palm Beach — this sounds pretty good. If you are someone looking to buy a home, though? Oh well!
Using the excellent repository of Census Bureau information at IPUMS.org, I grabbed data on home ownership in the U.S. over time. Most Americans live in homes that they own or for which they have a mortgage. But many do not.
As you might have guessed, there are some differences by age. Young people are much less likely to own homes, and those aged 35 to 44 are less likely to now than they were before the recent recession. (One moment [holds earpiece] — I am being told that the Great Recession was nearly 20 years ago, which can't be right. I'll keep you posted.)
You will also probably not be surprised to learn that White Americans are more likely to own their homes than non-White Americans. (As always, my apologies to those who are clumped into the category of "other." Sample-size issues force us into uncomfortable positions.) (As Thomas Wolfe also said, probably.)
Perhaps the most useful way to understand Trump's comments is that his proposal generally advantages wealthier Americans. The more you make relative to the median household income, the more likely you are (and long have been) to own your own home.
This isn't surprising: age and race correlate to income. But age, race and income also correlate to partisanship, so I was curious the extent to which this proposal benefitted Republicans in particular.
I took a stab at a bivariate choropleth map — a fancy term for a map that uses a color palette that changes along two dimensions. The problem is that data was only available for more populous counties (sample size!), so the map looks a bit barren.
If we cluster those counties into deciles (chunks representing one-tenth of the total), we see a correlation: places with more home ownership were more likely to support Trump in 2024.
See how the dots below fall into a rough line from lower left to upper right? Lower left is lower home ownership and more support for Kamala Harris. Upper right is higher home ownership and more support for the guy who wants to increase the wealth of home owners.
Just a coincidence, I'm sure. Once Trump realizes that young, non-White people will be disadvantaged by his proposal, I imagine he'll reconsider it. (One moment [holds earpiece] — I am being told "hahaha.")
Chapter 2
Americans dislike snow more than Democrats
The relentlessly (and still) useful Census Bureau also released data this week showing where Americans moved between 2023 and 2024. This is immensely interesting, for those who like this sort of thing, an index of interstate movement that informs you (for example) that approximately 550 people moved from Hawaii to Alaska for inexplicable reasons.
I mean, moving from a blue state to a red one? In this economy?
As some online commentary noted, such moves are not atypical. In fact, more people moved from blue states to red states in 2024 than vice versa. But this has actually been the norm. Stepping back in five-year increments to the earliest available data, we see that blue states have consistently shipped more people to red ones, to varying degrees.
But this is using a definition of "red" and "blue" that depends on the 2024 election. If we use a more nuanced definition — looking at states that have always voted red or blue since 2004 and those that haven't — we see that blue states are sending far more people to swing states. (If you're curious, there have been 16 consistently blue states and 20 consistently red ones during that period.)