Homeownership by People (HPOP)

Overview

The homeowners-to-population ratio (HPOP) is the share of the adult population that owns the home they live in. It was defined by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis as an alternative to the figure usually cited as the homeownership rate, which is technically the owner-occupancy rate. The concept, definition, and rationale are the Minneapolis Fed's; this page documents how CommunityScale computes it for the geographies shown in our atlas and dashboards.

The distinction is between counting homes and counting people. The owner-occupancy rate is the share of occupied housing units in which the owner lives, so a house with a homeowning couple, their two adult children, and a grandparent counts the same as a studio with a single owner: one owner-occupied unit. HPOP instead asks what share of adults own their home, which brings in adults who live in an owner-occupied home without owning it (adult children, co-residing relatives, roommates) and adults who live in group quarters (dormitories, nursing homes, correctional facilities), all of whom the owner-occupancy rate leaves out.

For the national figures, the owner-occupancy rate is about 65 percent while HPOP is about 53 percent.

Definition

HPOP in year t is the number of adult homeowners divided by the total adult population:

HPOP_t = n_h,t / N_t

where N_t is all people aged 18 and older, and n_h,t is the number of those adults who are homeowners. We report the result as a percentage.

Who counts as a homeowner

An adult is counted as a homeowner when both conditions hold:

1. They live in an owner-occupied housing unit. The ACS tenure variable is reported as "owned with a mortgage or loan" or "owned free and clear." Adults in rental units, units occupied without payment of rent, and group quarters are not homeowners.
2. They are the reference person, or the spouse or unmarried partner of the reference person. The reference person is the person in whose name the home is owned or rented. Other adults in an owner-occupied home (adult children, parents, other relatives, roommates) are counted in the denominator but not as homeowners.

Who counts in the adult population

Every person aged 18 and older is in the denominator, including adults in group quarters. This is the difference that most changes the picture for younger adults: because only about a third of adults under 35 are the reference person of a household, and because college dormitory residents are group-quarters population, HPOP for adults under 35 is substantially lower than the owner-occupancy rate for households headed by someone under 35.

Data and computation

HPOP is computed from American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Area (PUMS) microdata. Each person record carries an age, a person weight, a relationship-to-reference-person code, and a Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA); each housing record carries a tenure code. We join person records to their housing record, restrict to adults, flag homeowners by the two conditions above, and weight by the person weight.

CommunityScale computes HPOP from the five-year ACS PUMS samples in our data lake, currently 2010 through 2024. The Minneapolis Fed's published figures use the one-year samples. The two are the same measure computed the same way; the five-year sample is a moving average of five years of data, so our series is slightly smoother and lags the one-year series by roughly one percentage point in years of rapid change. Our national 2024 estimate (52.8 percent, from the 2020 to 2024 sample) sits about half a point below the Fed's one-year 2024 estimate (53.2 percent), and our state estimates match the Fed's published state figures within about two-thirds of a percentage point on average.

Group quarters are included in the denominator automatically, because group-quarters residents appear in the PUMS person file with their own person weights.

Geographic aggregation

Because every person is assigned a PUMA, summing the per-PUMA homeowner and adult counts reproduces state and national totals exactly, with no crosswalk required.

For metropolitan and micropolitan areas (Core-Based Statistical Areas, or CBSAs), we translate PUMAs into CBSAs with a population-weighted crosswalk. Counties nest exactly within CBSAs, and PUMAs are unions of whole census tracts, so we assign each PUMA to CBSAs by the share of its tract population that falls in each CBSA's counties. PUMA definitions are revised each decade, so we apply the crosswalk that matches each sample's PUMA vintage (2010-vintage PUMAs for samples through 2022, 2020-vintage from 2023 onward). Metro-level estimates are available for 2016 through 2024.

Relationship to the owner-occupancy rate

The owner-occupancy rate is the share of occupied, non-group-quarters housing units in which the owner resides, weighted by the household weight. HPOP is always the lower of the two, because its denominator is larger: it counts every adult rather than every occupied unit, and owner-occupied households tend to contain more adults than renter households. The gap between the two rates is a useful summary of how many adults live in homes they do not own.

Data sources

References

• Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, "New homeownership measure puts people first" (2026), the article introducing HPOP.
• Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, HPOP datasets and technical documentation, the official data release and data dictionary.
• Explore HPOP at every PUMA on the CommunityScale atlas.