Texas May Be Middle Class 'Mecca' for Housing

The Lone Star state had the highest concentration of cities best suited for middle-class American homebuyers. The Pew Research Center defines middle-class household earnings as being between $42,000 and $125,000 per year.

The two Texas cities that cracked the top five best for middle-class Americans were Austin and El Paso, ranked third and fifth, respectively. The median household income in Austin is $74,300, with a middle-class home price range of $216,100 to $564,800. The market share of middle-class homes is nearly 70 percent. About 600 miles away in El Paso, this city had the lowest income in the Realtor.com ranking, but has an abundance of affordable homes, nearly 70 percent of the local housing market, with a median price of $167,000.

"The bottom line here is the middle class is getting squeezed when it comes to homes,” says Robert Hughes, senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. “These people don’t have steady, good-paying jobs, and they can’t get financing at that price—it can be very hard for them to buy a house," adds Peter Temin, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "That spells trouble for them later in life: Owning a home is one way to build wealth. So they don't have a good way to save.They're kind of trapped.”

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