By: Alan Aptheker
Based on this title, you may think I’ll be discussing the excessive use of alliteration in the titles of articles about the housing industry. No, it’s about Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Index, or S&P/Case–Shiller, or “CSI.” It’s a U.S. national home price set of indices that measures the average change in the total value of all existing single-family homes, in the aggregate, in the U.S. The first thing we can all agree upon: some studies just happen to end up with a very cool acronym.
Karl Case, Robert Shiller and Allan Weiss developed the CSI in the 1980s to come up with a more meaningful metric with respect to housing prices, that is, better than your basic monthly snapshot.
We look to the CSI to gauge how the housing…