2011 Housing Planning Study - Technical Report

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MODEL CHANGES FOR 2011 As requested by users, no major changes were made to the Hawaii Housing Model in 2011. There were changes made to the data. Most of these were required because of advances in data collection and reporting between 2005 and 2011. All of those changes provided more data and more accurate data for use in the model. Employing them, however, required some major manipulations of some data series and some minor changes in programming. For those who are interested in these niceties, we discuss them briefly below. Readers who are interested in learning even more about these issues can contact Jim Dannemiller at SMS. Rental Prices, 2005 to 2011 This topic has been covered in greater detail in another report in the HHPS 2011 series. The fundamental issue is that the rental housing study, which has always been based on capturing newspaper advertisements on Hawaii rentals, has been recently compromised. The rental advertising trade is rapidly moving from print media to the Internet. Those who are engaged measuring rental advertising have not yet been able to develop systems to accurately reflect the market. Their efforts are continuing and program may be made from the next study. In the meantime, the Census Bureau has begun to include a question on recent rent prices (and recent home purchase prices) in the American Community Survey. This may be an excellent source of information in the future, but is a new effort in 2011 that has not been adequately tested. Other sources of rental price information are available, especially the HUD measurement of Fair Market Rents (FMR). But these too have definitional problems that compromise their utility for use in the Housing Model. For 2011, we have forecast the past rental prices based on the rate of change in FMR. The 2010 level is currently based on a combination of estimates from the old rental studies and the 2009 ACS. We will update to the 2010 census numbers as they become available. Housing Unit Counts, 2000 to 2011 This is another topic that has been covered in a separate report in the HHPS 2011 series. The issue is that the Housing Inventory, based on review of TMK records, does not coincide with figures on housing units and housing typos supplied by the Census and ACS. The problem is being approached by several agencies in Hawaii and will be resolved within the next year or so. For the current Model we have built in the 2010 Census data where possible as an anchor. The pathway from past Inventory made through the last half of the decade has been straight-lined from 2006 to 2011. Other New Data Series Several other pieces of data have proved to be problematic in the updating of the housing model for this report. We list them briefly below. Those who are interested in further detail may contact the authors. Hawaii Housing Planning Study, 2011: Technical Report Page 15 ©SMS, Inc. November,2011