This is super dope. Might be a naive question, but do you trace all of these by hand or do you have a way to automate it?

Housing affordability is a huge topic, so there's a lot of it there on this. Since, you didn't say what country you're interested in, I'm going to go ahead and assume the U.S., because that's what I know. I imagine many of these sources have correlaries in other countries though.

Many of the variables you listed are available through the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (population, income, housing prices, rent burden).

I'm less familiar with it, but FRED Economic Data may be able to give you more information on the interest rate side.

Housing supply and construction can be trickier to get at. A lot of places track new construction but it's often behind a paywall -- and this is often tracked by real estate professionals so there's sometimes some bias built in. The Census Bureau has a report on New Residential construction, but I haven't found it overwhelming accurate when you get down to the smaller geographies. If you have a specific place you're interested in, you may be able to get information on total residential buildings/units from the local assessor's (sometimes auditors) office. Building permits are often used as a proxy for new housing construction, though it often requires some careful cleaning, and may be publicly available from the local gov's building/planning department. A lot of states and municipalities have data portal websites which can usually be found by googling "(place name) open data."

Or if you just want some stats on American housing, Harvard has a commonly cited report: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/state-nations-housing-2022

Though there's a lot more out there too. Good luck!

I worked as a journalist for about five years and left the field early-covid. We'd comb through police reports and court logs, but never death records. Pretty sure recent ones weren't publicly available where I worked and it would have been a wildly poor use of our time to request and read through all the names if they were. We heard about the deaths we wrote about through a variety of sources and would follow-up with relevant officials to verify.

Yeah, maybe to verify after you get a tip or something. Checking the logs consistently would be a huge amount of time and effort for very little reward. And they're not even publicly available in many areas.

What about looking over death registrations makes someone scummy? And I sincerely doubt any reporter wastes their time consistently checking death registrations.

If the underlying driver is thinking about mortality, it seems both the declaration of war and the death of loved ones would drive up the rate.

It's possible the declaration of war had this effect, but the pattern of the dots raise some red flags, which I would want to investigate further before supporting any interpretation.

Damn, dude. Because it's a super clean shift and data is rarely that clean. It's possible it's related to the war, but it's very fair to question.

Also it looks like it's followed by only a very slight trend upward in subsequent months which is kind of weird. As casualties increase, and there's more passed family members to honor, why doesn't it continue increasing at a steeper slope?