The U.S. Cities Where It Takes the Longest to Be Able to Afford to Buy a Home

In places like San Francisco and Manhattan, housing prices have soared to record highs, pricing out large swaths of the middle class. But in parts of the Rustbelt and Sunbelt, home prices have still not fully recovered from the devastating effects of the Great Recession. With Americans set to spend nearly $10 trillion on housing over the next five years, the question remains: Where are we spending the most, especially when compared to our incomes, to purchase homes?

My Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander and I developed a simple metric that allows us to compare the burden of a home purchase across metro areas. We calculated the number of years’ worth of income, on average, it would take to buy a home in metros across the country. To do this, we compared data on the average estimate sale prices of homes in metro areas from Zillow to data on average incomes in those same metro areas for both families and singles from the U.S. Census.