Recently the U.S. Census Bureau released updated population estimates through 2018 for the United States, states, counties, and metropolitan statistical areas (MSA). Press release
I tweeted out the following chart comparing house prices and state population dynamics.
demographics are an important driver of #housing market trends. here's a comparison of growth in state population and nominal house prices since the year 2000
left to right: more people
bottom to top: higher home prices pic.
Earlier this month I attended the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) annual policy conference in Washington D.C. LINK. One of the keynote speeches was by Alan Greenspan. During his remarks, Greenspan mentioned that while economic forecasting was hard demographic projections were the surest thing in an uncertain business.
Demographics of course are not easy, but it’s much easier to guess what the population of 30 years olds will be in 5 years than it is the predict the unemployment rate or GDP in 5 years.
In this post I want review some trends in U.S. housing supply and demand. Specifically I want to look at county level trends in population, housing supply (the total number of housing units) and house prices. We’ll uncover some interesting trends.
Per usual we will make our graphics with R. Preparing the data required several steps that I will outline in a follow up post. For now we’ll just proceed with the data I’ve put together.
EARLIER TODAY THE U.S. CENSUS BUREAU released new estimates of population for U.S. states from 2010 through 2017. Let’s see how population trends look compared to recent house price growth.
We’ll combine the Census estimates for state population with the Freddie Mac House Price Index.
The chart below plots population growth rates by state from July of 2010 to July of 2017 against house price appreciation rates over that same period.
R statistics dataviz remix flexdashboard
WE ARE GOING TO EXAMINE THE DISTRIBUTION OF US POPULATION and make an animated gif combining a map and a kernel density estimate of the distribution of county population densities. Density of densities, or density squared.
We are going to use the same US County Population Estimates 1790-2010 we used in my previous post.
We’ll end up with this:
How do we do it?
Code First, we’ll load the data and do some manipulations.
SOMETIMES YOU ACTUALLY LEARN SOMETHING from social media. Today on Twitter I happened across this Tweet via @kyle_e_walker:
Seems somebody posted estimates of the U.S. population by county (defined by 2010 county definitions) going back to 1790. This is a perfect dataset to practice my mapping with R.
The data are conveniently available via the University of Minnesota. The data come in a nice spreadsheet that we can easily import into R and manipulate.
EARLIER THIS WEEK THE U.S. CENSUS BUREAU released dataon population and housing units for counties across the U.S. in 2015. These data reveal important trends in population growth, and help shed light on recent house price trends.
Housing unit growth One key factor driving housing market dynamics is the expansion of housing supply (or lack thereof). The updated estimates from Census allow us to see which areas have added the most housing units and how that relates to population and house price trends.