Housing as a Heuristic Condition in the Simultaneous Projection of Population and Households

Abstract

Conventional population projections regard individuals, rather than households, as population units of reference. Such an approach has been questioned on both methodological and empirical grounds. Furthermore, in applications to smaller populations, conventional population projections have repeatedly yielded poor results. The simultaneous projection of population and households, on the other hand, regards households as population units of reference, but, in applications based on the notion of the household composition matrix, it has occasionally yielded analytically infeasible results. In the present study I examine the simultaneous projection of population and households in a etropolitan area, under feasibility constraints. A housing-market specification is expressed as a feasibility condition against multipliers of the household composition matrix, extracted here for the Cleveland Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA), 1990. The feasibility condition is shown to function as a gateway to exogenous considerations regarding the transfer of headship in households, and is exemplified in a forecast of population and households for the Cleveland CMSA.