New Research Shows Spectrum of U.S. Housing Unaffordability

New analysis of housing affordability by metro evaluates how many years it would take a buyer earning the median household income to purchase a median home.

In the Bay Area and in Los Angeles, it would take over nine years, whereas in Youngstown, Ohio, saving up enough to buy a median home would take only 1.9 years. These metros make up the two poles in the wide spectrum of housing affordability in the U.S., per CityLab co-founder Richard Florida's research. Florida lays the problem of housing unaffordability at the feet of land-use restrictions and NIMBYism in the most expensive cities, and advises that this problem needs to be "understood as a core feature of economic inequality."

The rule of thumb long used by real estate agents and homebuyers is that you can afford a house if its price is equivalent to roughly 2.6 years of your household income. That ratio is based on historical nationwide averages under healthy economic conditions. But today, in many places around the country—particularly in coastal cities in California and along the New York–Boston–Washington corridor—housing has become staggeringly more expensive than that.

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