Geographic Adjustments: Fair Market Rents and the Supplemental Poverty Measure

In 2020, the Census Bureau commissioned the National Academies of Science Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) to convene an expert consensus panel to evaluate the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) and recommend improvements to the measure. Those recommendations were published in March 2023 (Ziliak et al., 2023). Chief among the recommendations is a new look at the treatment of housing in the SPM. Specifically, the CNSTAT panel recommended the use of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Fair Market Rents (FMR) for the housing portion of the SPM poverty threshold. The purpose of this paper is to build on this recommendation and evaluate the impact of using the FMRs to geographically adjust poverty thresholds in the current SPM framework.