Studies are like snowflakes — no two are alike
All of these "studies" also come out every year, so now, into year seven of being the editor at the News-Topic, I've seen many of them before.
One email that came this past week was a "reminder" that on
Problem is we've already written that story -- the last time it came out.
In sorting through my email to find out when that was, though, I came across two different "studies" from two other websites showing both the most affordable and least affordable places to live in
It's not Sawmills' fault.
All three of these purport to show the most/least affordable places to live based on housing costs.
The two studies that don't list Sawmills, from HomeArea.com and UnitedStatesZipCodes.org, both base their rankings on data from the
HomeArea.com's top five most affordable:
UnitedStatesZipCodes.org's top five:
The key difference between these two seems to be that HomeArea.com is evaluating large areas, while UnitedStateZipCodes.org is analyzing individual ZIP codes. Sawmills doesn't have a ZIP code -- it's divided between the
But no part of
HomeArea.com has omissions of its own. For one, no part of the
Back to SmartAsset. I'll give it credit for one thing: It cites a lot more sources. It includes the exact same
But let's circle back to the one factor that the ZIP code study probably got right: margin of error.
All of SmartAsset.com's most affordable are very small towns. The question is how many house sales are included in this data? A small sample size can lead to large errors. If you have just a handful of sales in a year, and they all happen to be smaller, older houses, your area looks a lot more affordable than it would in a year when several larger, newer houses sell. A large number of sales tends to even that out.
That certainly doesn't mean that Sawmills is not among the most affordable places to live in
It just means that you can craft a study to show anything you want if you mix the right set of statistics.
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