To measure city housing prices, you need to count the actual houses

Current ways of measuring city housing prices are often wrong. They do not properly account for different neighborhoods or the number of homes.

Economists and city planners have relied on housing price indexes to make big decisions about everything from inflation to urban development. This paper shows that many of those indexes are built on shaky ground. If you do not properly account for the specific types of homes in specific areas, you are not really measuring what is happening on the ground.