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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BGR who wrote (78572)	3/24/2000 12:29:00 PM
From: Michael Bakunin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Bukun, I'm sheltered, sure. OTOH, I take the bus three times a week in Oakland. Rents and housing prices for the folks on the bus are being squeezed by the same percentage terms I hear for fashionable neighborhoods in San Francisco. It's certain areas (i.e., the rural south) from which I have no anecdotes -- but which I just can't see affecting a properly-weighted shelter cost calculation that much. If you'll see stats.bls.gov you'll see shelter costs up a mere 2.8% Y/Y, which just doesn't jibe with my experience or reports I've heard from any area. A quick skim of stats.bls.gov indicates one possible problem: lag. "Because rents are not volatile, the Housing sample is divided into panels; one panel is priced each month and each panel is priced twice a year.." However, that alone can't possibly explain the fact that the San Francisco shelter component is up 5-6%, when I expected 10-20%. Another explanation is marginal: while CPI prices for tomatoes always reflect the marginal cost of buying a tomato today, shelter costs reflect, in part, unavailable rental contracts that were available yesterday or -year. My last guess is that there's an aggregation issue; I can't quite figure how the BLS aggregates their data. -mb