Does the SPM take homelessness into account? If it has weighting for higher rates of unhoused individuals, the correlation could simply be with climate. CA and TX for example are wealthy, have higher than average homelessness, and have few days below freezing annually in their major population centers.
The data comes from the Current Population Survey, which is sponsored jointly by the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Labor Statistics. This is a household survey, so it only samples those with an address. This is a potential shortcoming of the survey, as states like Hawaii, New York, and California with homelessness rates of ~0.3% to ~0.5% may in fact get undercounted.
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