Measuring America’s Affordability Problem: Comparing Alternative Measurements of Affordable Housing
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Significant scholarly and policy debate has focused on the measurement of affordable housing, with emphasis on what is an appropriate threshold of affordability. However, this threshold is only one component of affordable housing measurement, with accurate and substantively appropriate measurements of income and households also being needed. In this study, I produce a series of estimates of affordable housing among low-income households in the United States under unique combinations of income, providers of income within the household, and thresholds of affordability. I find that these alternative measures yield a broad range of estimates ranging from a majority of households (69.8%) to a low of 20.2%. When examining how individual criteria affect estimates, I find that focusing on wage income alone and using residual income both drastically influence estimates. Ethnoracial disparities are also affected, with alternative measurements often muting—but never completely explaining—disparities between White and non-White households.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it