Who is keeping count?

The National Association of Counties is offering a matchmaking tool which helps link housing strategies to governments based on their situations.

This joint effort between the Brookings Institute and the Aspen Insitute Financial Program looks promising. But what I wanted to note here is the category of the cost that is attributed to housing in the core counties of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro. Both Hennepin and Ramsey counties are highlighted in green which is labeled as low-to-moderate cost. I agree with this representation.

Ten days ago the New York Times ran an article entitled The Housing Shortage Isn’t Just a Coastal Crisis Anymore. For this article the shortage of housing is scarlet hot red.

Since scarcity and prices are tied together, one of these two representations is inaccurate. The New York Times article relied on data from and organization UpforGrowth.org. I scoured the site for background on how they calculated their underproduction of housing but was unable to locate a reference to methods.

It just seems like there should be a reliable count of the number of dwellings in a city consisting of those in use, minus those being demolished plus those near completion. Otherwise, it seems that data generators are being hijacked for political reasons.