People who own a standalone GPS

As fewer Americans have owned standalone GPS devices, more new houses have been built, a correlation that raises the philosophical question of whether people who cannot find their way around are less likely to need a new address. The correlation is -0.962 across sixteen years, which is strong enough to make a real estate developer wonder if they should be watching Garmin's quarterly earnings. The GPS devices are disappearing, the houses are appearing, and the connection between them is exactly nothing.

Standalone GPS ownership peaked around 2008–2010 and then declined sharply as smartphones absorbed their function entirely. Housing starts, meanwhile, crashed during the 2008 financial crisis (falling from about 2 million to under 600,000 annually) and then spent the next fourteen years recovering, eventually reaching about 1.6 million by 2022. The negative correlation exists because one metric was steadily declining while the other was steadily recovering, and they happened to cross paths on the same timeline. The GPS decline is a technology story; the housing recovery is a macroeconomic story. They share a decade, not a mechanism, and the financial crisis that suppressed one had nothing to do with the smartphone that killed the other.

Sixteen years of GPS devices falling and housing starts rising is a textbook example of two independent monotonic trends producing an impressive but meaningless correlation. The GPS did not suppress housing. The housing did not save the GPS. They were simply two ships passing in the night, one sinking and the other rising, neither aware of the other's course. Recalculating route.