The commonly reported statistic asks, what percentage of adults live in homes owned by a resident, rather than rent? That’s been steady in the mid-60 percentages for decades.

This new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis offers another statistic for consideration: the ratio of homeowners to the adult population.

The main categories of people who differ in this proposed methodology:

• People who live in group home settings that do not ordinarily count as renters, like dorms, nursing homes, and prisons, are now included in the denominator (and not considered homeowners). Previously, these didn’t count towards the ratio in either the numerator or denominator.
• Adult family members of homeowners who do not pay rent (adult children, parents of an owner, etc.), or adult roommates paying for a room. This turns out to be about 13.9% of the population.

Most importantly, these are unevenly distributed by geographical region, age, other demographics. Not all of these are bad (nothing wrong with multi-generation living arrangements), but they can show trends across time or place, and pick up less noticeable trends in people’s living situations more broadly.