DISCLAIMER

This paper reports the results of research and analysis undertaken by BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) and Census Bureau staff. It has undergone a more limited review than official publications, and is released to inform interested parties of research and to encourage discussion. All views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views or policies of their respective agencies or the views of other staff therein. The authors accept responsibility for any errors.

In this paper we describe and present four approaches to include the “cost” of shelter in a poverty measure through the thresholds. These include two approaches based on shelter expenditures and two approaches that include the costs of consumption flows of shelter services which account for the occupancy of owner occupied housing. The first two approaches do not account for homeownership but use out-of-pocket shelter costs as the NAS Panel did and then expand on that measure. The first of these two approaches we refer to as the Consumer Expenditure (CE) publication definition or the NAS measure. The second we refer to as the CE outlays measure. The third is based on rental equivalence values reported by consumer units participating in the CE Interview. For the fourth, we estimate a value for the flow of services using a combination of reported rental equivalence and market value of owned home. This last measure is based on the approach employed by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) for the PCE.