I recently downloaded several tables related with aggregate rent asked and housing values. As I looked up the table cookbooks, I did not find the answers to some of the questionns I have for properly interpretating the data.
For instance, why there are quite amount of records in the table column that do not have values? Does the unit of measurement “Dollars” for aggregate rent and housing values mean “Dollars/sqft” or “Dollars/acres”? In addition, why the unit of measurement for “Median Gross Rent as a Percentage of Household Income in the Past 12 Months” is “Dollars” rather than “%”?
I have some answers for you, and will get more for you tomorrow!
The unit of measurement for aggregate rent and housing values are in “dollars”. The Census Bureau essentially computes the aggregate value of all owner-occupied housing units in the census tract, county, or other geographic unit. It also computes the aggregate rent of all renter-occupied housing units. These two will let you compute a per-housing unit value or rent (as opposed to a median value).
As for the “Median Gross Rent as a Percentage of Household Income in the Past 12 Months (Dollars)”, the unit of measurement is a percentage. The word “Dollars” is actually in the title of table that we get from the US Census Bureau. We make minimal edits to the table titles that come from the Census Bureau. We change titles to indicate those that are only available for certain areas of the country (e.g., Puerto Rico) or for certain geographic levels (e.g., Nation only).
In order to answer your question about records with missing values, could you provide me with the geographic unit (e.g., county, census tract, city) for which you downloaded data? Could you also tell me which dataset you got the data from?