I don't think that's a super useful number since if you're somewhere where it's easier to earn that amount, homes are likely gonna be more expensive.
It would be much more interesting to know how far short the median income falls of median income needed to afford a home in that same region the income is earned - I think that's more insightful for an overall picture of how affordable houses are and you could do region by region comparisons.
I would hypothesize that even though the median income might be above that threshold or close to it in some regions like Manhattan and parts of the bay, the affordability gap would actually be greater in a large number of those relatively higher income regions than relatively lower income regions elsewhere
Unfortunately there's a really high risk of issues like Simpson's paradox when you average together distinct populations like this, meaning the combined statistic/insight could actually be showing the opposite of the experience you're likely to experience within each region.
No home buyer isn't part of a region. Given that where you buy a home and where you live are very highly correlated, it's hard to tell if this is over or under stating the actual average experience. Your actual experience of housing affordability is regional not global.
In this case my hypothesis is that this number is actually an underestimate of how unaffordable housing is, though for all we know it could be that some significant regions like rural regions are more affordable. There's no way to tell from this number alone.
This is the trend everywhere in the Western world. At some point we need to think about what all those countries have in common and start making strategic choices to move away from it (hint: it starts with Reagan, Thatcher and other local equivalents in the 80s)
It's not really the economy in general. It's just cities. Most major US metro areas have under-built housing compared to demand every decade since the 1970s, and all of it is entirely self-inflicted through zoning and permitting.
The only real hope of progress here is for states to start outright overriding local laws around housing, as California has been increasingly doing.
The laws that have been passed in California will not have any meaningful impact on affordability, so I wouldn’t look to them for hope or progress. It would take decades and decades of building at a level not seen since the postwar era to undo the damage done to the state by real estate speculators and Proposition 13.
Lots of things could instantly change housing availability (e.g. banning investment funds from owning homes, direct state construction, abolition of zoning), but none of those will happen because they would cost real estate speculators money, as well as the politicians they bankroll.
If you go far enough away from the nearest city that housing prices drop, median income drops as well. I'm not saying I'm surprised that housing in NYC is expensive, but I live in the suburbs of Philadelphia (specifically in one of the cheaper areas that's still close enough to commute into the city) and housing is expensive here too.
Housing is incredibly expensive everywhere in the US because every major metro area is short on housing [1]. It really doesn't matter where you go specifically because anywhere that people might want to live, for any reason, suffers from the spillover effect from all the people in high-population states who will never be able to afford homes there.
Of course, you have to consider the incentives for builders when it comes to house sizes. A lot of cities have lot size requirements or setback requirements that make it pointless to build smaller houses because the lot has to be a certain minimum size anyway.
This is also why rowhouses are so expensive: people like them, but in most US cities nobody is allowed to build new ones.
Tyranny of averages... You can buy a home on way less than that here in Iowa. If you're renting here it's because you're planning on moving sooner rather than later.
DSM is pretty affordable but I'm 2 hours out and it's even better. Maybe that figure would make sense in MPLS.
I’ve just had a lot of friends who got sold the bill of goods of “move out to [insert Midwestern state] it’s so much cheaper and everyone is nice” only to get trapped in toxic, underpaying workplaces with nowhere to go. The ones that have families tend to just suffer through it and the ones that don’t end up back in big metros within a few years. And before you think I’m some coastal elitist, I was born and raised in unincorporated farm country. I just also know the realities of the job market.
tech-company tech-jobs sure. Iowa has an outsized financial sector and they all use computers. Lots of opportunity if you are willing to do some client serving as well, all my clients are complaining about how scarce labor is and im billing them dry in the meantime.
If FIs decide they hate me I know enough JD Edwards to consult in that realm instead.
To buy the home my grandparents bought in 1968 for $30k ($265k in 2023) in San Jose, CA would require an income of about $12k then ($90k in 2023). Today, with a value of $2.2m, that would require an income of about $800k.
Primarily, the only buyers in this hyperlocal market are rich people who move money from overseas because locals cannot afford it. Occasionally, there are the lucky few who survived and exited a startup or inherited wealth dot the landscape.
That number seems really low. Here in Seattle, the median home price is $804k, and a third of that is about $268k. I'm ignoring the down payment, but you get the idea.
And we're not the most expensive market by any means. If this number is an aggregation, I guess that's somewhat better news for people outside the cities.
And by outside the city, I mean 2-3 hours by car. Just moving to the next county isn't enough.
I also wonder what they mean by a "typical" home. Do they mean typical in terms of price, regardless of square footage or unit type, or do they mean "typical" in the sense of a 3/2 single occupancy dwelling with a certain square footage and yard size, etc.?
Absolutely, same here in Australia. Using markets as a mechanism for price discovery (what they are good at) for a necessity has gone predictably badly. Yes, people will put themselves in huge amounts of debt for a secure living situation, shocking I know.. /s.
I don’t know about Australia but the real problem in the US is that the aforementioned interests (homeowners, speculators) have acted effectively like a cartel to restrict supply. They do this by pulling out every possible objection to block construction permits.
Price signals work if supply can raise to meet demand. When house prices go up it becomes more profitable to build, etc. But when the supply side mechanism is blocked for a necessity then prices will just go up, and up, and up… especially if it can also be bought on leverage.
It helps to also look before 1965. Right about 1970 or so was a very low point in the ratio of income to home price. It was higher before then, and since. If you look at the early 1970s as abnormal, then 4x is a pretty good estimate of the long term average. It's higher now, and was higher in 2008, but it's correctable.
How has the size of the average home changed? In terms of square feet. I’m curious how that affects the price increase rate. We definitely need to build more housing, that’s for sure. I’m very hopeful that the huge investments into renewables and modernizing the grid will produce a huge growth in worker compensation and another economic boom.
Or for that matter, what percentage of housing is new builds? My house is almost 90, and it doesn’t seem notably old, that’s just how old a lot of the housing in my suburb is.
Home size is a factor, but lot size is a more important one. Many cities explicitly or implicitly require minimum lot sizes and setbacks that make it pointless for builders to make small starter houses.
I wouldn't even say lot size is a factor as much as simply zoning rules and regulations. there aren't a lot of high cost of living areas, with the exception of maybe places like Manhattan, that actually don't have space for more housing. and even there, they have plenty of under-utilized space zoned for other things.
If you're a dual income/parent household, you have to afford both the house payments and childcare; typical child care costs can be so great that it makes sense for one parent to drop out of the workforce to care for children so you're back at square one with a single income household. At a median income of $57k your options are house XOR children which does a decent job of explaining why we're seeing birth rates plummet.
It's so awesome society cares so much about kids they'll toss you in jail for leaving them in the car while you run in the gas station to pay, but they won't lift a finger to contribute to the future tax slaves until they're five. Society in its sick tragedy of the commons war against parents want to get all the tax generation rewards with none of the risk and the minority of the investment.
You might be from another country, but in the US there are very generous tax credits (better than deductions) for people with children. It doesn't make children free or profitable, but it's unfair to say "society doesn't care".
The credit barely covers the increased property taxes incurred to inhabit a larger structure, to fulfil laws such as child safety equipment, taxes on diapers, extra costs of registering and state mandated insurance of larger vehicle with additional seats for children. And other mandates imposed by law. They are at best covering cost of their own mandates and other child related taxes.
It is the single largest tax credit in the entire US tax code. My point is that it's unfair to say "society doesn't care". I'm not necessarily arguing that it's currently at the perfect amount.
"It's so awesome society cares so much about kids they'll toss you in jail for leaving them in the car while you run in the gas station to pay, but they won't lift a finger to contribute to the future tax slaves until they're five"
This is your quote, there's a lot of sarcasm which makes it awkward to directly quote but we can all see the point your trying to get across. Society "won't lift a finger" for parents with young children.
But they do the child tax credit, and not only that, it's even more generous for children age 5 and under! So they do "lift a finger to contribute to the future tax slaves until they're five" in your direct words.
They lift the finger in the sense they yank it down and then lift it almost to the same place. As I've just explained, additional other child related taxes and state mandates counterbalance that credit to the point they're lifting the finger they smacked down to about where it started. It is like bragging about applying a bandaid after a punch to the face.
Vast majority of house holds are not dual income equal pay... also... tons of other stats that contradict that. 73k is median, make this a great deal above median.
According to BLS, 53% of households are dual income, 66% of households with children are dual income. The difference, according to the BLS, is that old retired people are often single income and don't have kids. But retired people are generally not in the market as first time homebuyers anyway.
my dude median HOUSEHOLD income is 73k, that means 40 something and 30. I'm feeling like this is an elaborate joke based on your handle because you certainly do...
I never made a claim that every american could go out and buy a house right now? I said that for dual income families it is very achievable. You are quoting median household numbers to me which is immaterial to the arguments here considered. I'm interested in dual earning household income.
I can't find figures for this with BLS, but Rocket Mortgage who has a lot of data on american family and homebuyer incomes says that the average dual income family WITH kids brings in $129k per year. Even higher for DINKs. Now this is average not median, but I think it's still paints the broad picture I'm trying to communicate. I doubt median is half the average.
Household with children is 82k -- so yes they can be half average. Of course the average HOUSEBUYER will be higher than the overall median household with children. Come on man...
There is median household income and there is median earnings of dual income households. They are two different things. You keep talking about the former, I am only interested in the latter. Median household earnings figure contains many single income households.
There is no argument from me that buying a house on one income can be difficult. But my original comment way up at the top specifically says dual income households.
That 82k figure includes one income households. I want you to exclude all single income households because I am only talking about dual income households.
I'm not misunderstanding it, you're just continually citing an irrelevant data point comment after comment. This whole time, I have been talking about dual income households. You can tell me median household income figures until youre blue in the face; I am only talking about dual income household figures. They aren't the same thing.
Median household income includes dual income but also single income households. I only want to consider dual income households, because that's who I said can reasonably meet the $114k figure.
And I keep telling you, that is a dual income stat family of four. Dude. You are trying to cohort into an irrelevant corner of data and then still finding it not satisfactory. Stop, just take the L.
Dual income marriages had a median household income of roughly $135,000 to $145,000 in 2022. Marriages with a sole earner lagged far behind at around $75,000.
It is likely much more doable as a family unit. I can't speak for everyone, but I wish I didn't have to depend on anyone else to be to afford my own home.
Dual income is nice, but the ability for one or the other to not have to work (sickness, travel, sabbatical) would be really nice. Or just having the ability to live alone and not throw away money into rent.
Median household income in my city of 40K is $70K. Household. The median home price is over $400K.
It's that high because a toll lane was built to the nearest metropolitan city so the urbanites priced out of living close to their jobs could flood surrounding areas without the city needing to expand housing.
Meanwhile, our young graduates and public servants can't afford a mortgage in the town they work for, and the wealthy families either vote their enclaves to be exclusive receivers of local taxes, or else they carve themselves out to merge with the county of the metro area so they can siphon off their services, instead.
You think $57K is trivial, but wealth inequality is draining local workers dry.
Vast majority of skilled workers can live in a shoebox in some high CoL area with jobs until they come up with enough for say a 60k Clayton Homes mobile plus land in some podunkville where wiping asses at the one old folks home job will cover utilities and property taxes.
This is pretty much how I managed to afford a house when corona/fed blasted everything to oblivion...
> Homebuyers needed a $114,000 salary to afford a typical home in September — assuming a 7.2% mortgage rate with 20% down on a median priced home of $412,001 — according to real estate brokerage Redfin Corp.
Interesting. I wonder what it is for Seattle then.
> The median listing home price in Seattle, WA was $829K in September 2023, trending down -2.5% year-over-year. The median listing home price per square foot was $584. The median home sold price was $799.5K.
Seattle median household income is ~115,000 according to Seattle times (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-media...). This means that one of the highest earning cities in the U.S. isn't able to comfortably afford a home, even at median prices. So then I wonder how many people are moving into Seattle with high incomes in order to buy homes and such.
It's also very surprising to me that the median home sold price in Seattle is more than New York City.
I think you can just roughly double the salary there.
i.e. to afford a home roughly twice the price of the median in that analysis, it would take ~$230k salary to afford a home in Seattle.
My wife and I combined make about that, and that seems about right. Though, IMO the debt-to-income ratios that they consider "normal" for these types of analyses leave one further extended than I'd like to be. (Childcare isn't cheap!)
> It's also very surprising to me that the median home sold price in Seattle is more than New York City.
Surprised me too but then it seems more reasonable when you see media listing home price per sqft in New York is $780 compared to Seattle's $584. New Yorkers are just buying smaller places.
Given current interest rates, an American getting a mortgage today is going to be paying something like $2,000/month more just in interest than they were in early 2021, which is when I bought my house in Seattle.
At $799,000, you're looking at a monthly payment around $5,800/month. The definition of being cost-burdened on housing is when you spend more than 30% of your gross income on housing. That means you'd need a gross monthly income of $19,333 or $232,000 annually to not be rent-burdened in Seattle buying a median priced home.
People have been complaining on HN that "houses are too expensive to buy" almost since it started 15 years ago. Yet 65% of Americans currently own their own homes. This is not as high as the peak in 2005 of 69%, but higher than the low in 2016 of 63% [1]. And IIRC, home ownership rates are near historical highs. Home ownership rate was almost always below 50% before ww2 and rarely exceeded 65% until the housing bubble of 2000-2010 [2].
The simple fact, as unpalatable as it may be, is that buying a home is always "expensive". In the US anyway, the price seems to be set by people's income. That is, their ability to pay. What does change is the size and quality of the homes.
I'd like to find the definition of the measure, it may or may not be commonsense. For example, the unemployment rate does not track the count of unemployed people.
That chart clusters under 35 into a single group, which isn't helpful here. The closest actual range, of 35-45 has dropped a bit under 10% percent in that timeframe. Additionally, 35-45 has flipped from being a higher percent over the overall US to lower starting in the late 90s.
The percentage of home ownership by age group is important to understand. Far fewer younger people are purchasing homes now compared to ten years ago, 20 years ago.
>People have been complaining on HN that "houses are too expensive to buy" almost since it started 15 years ago. Yet 65% of Americans currently own their own homes.
Yes, because the current set of of homeowners includes people from many different years and therefore hole buying difficulties. It’s not very relevant to compare it to a figure for how currently difficult it is to buy a home.
> Renter-occupied housing units increased at over twice the rate of owner-occupied housing units.
> Between 2010 and 2020, renter-occupied units grew from 40.7 million units to 46.8 million units, a growth rate of 14.8 percent. Over the same period, owner-occupied units increased 5.4 percent, from 76.0 million owner-occupied units to 80.1 million units.
> Renter-occupied housing units also increased at a faster rate than owner-occupied units between 2000 and 2010,when the nation experienced a 14.2 percent increase in rental units and an 8.8 percent increase in owner-occupied units.
> Since 2000, renter-occupied units increased 31.1 percent, while owner-occupied units increased 14.7 percent.
> The 2020 homeownership rate [63.1%] was the lowest it has been since 1970.
Hasn't the rise in price greatly exceeded the rise in income? If so, sure they're always expensive in an absolute sense being of multiple years' pay, but enormously more so now. Since shelter is more important than other things, the rate of ownership really depends on how much is taken out for rentals or left empty. The money/capital remaining for anything else is smaller.
Size and quality don't change for pre-existing stock. There are a lot of crappy ranch houses that cost 1.3-1.8 MM now.
Here I sit as an employee of the State of California, at the top of my profession, at the top of my salary band... and living in the Bay Area, if I didn't have supplemental income I couldn't even afford to buy a new car.
This isn't a "woe is me" statement, I love my job, have other sources of income, and will be fine. Many of my coworkers are not so lucky. Our comically ineffective union just negotiated a new contract with a 10% raise over 3 years. That will likely be less than inflation. Public employee job postings stay open for months because it is so difficult to recruit anyone. More and more people move into private industry where they do little to serve the public but are more fairly compensated. More broadly, in the Bay Area, there are a small group of professionals who make a decent salary, and then there is everyone else. Something has to give eventually. I worry what that will look like.
State employees get pension. The pay raises are guaranteed every year. No risk of layoffs. If you started early, you can retire by early 50s. The pensions are worth a ton and stability is guaranteed for retirement. I read a recent article, Govt employee, about 120Kish in income, can retire at 52 years with really good pension, the equivalent of having 6 million in the bank.
The most common CALPERS retirement formula is 2% at 62. If you retire at 52, you will get 1%. The formula would be:
0.01 * (years of service) * (final compensation)
Where final compensation is usually an average over your last 36 months.
If your final compensation is 120k, and you have worked in a state job for 30 years, your annual pension would be $36,000
Pay raises are NOT guaranteed. The last general salary increase I had was in 2021. There can be layoffs, although they are rare, and in some cases you may have retreat rights. There were layoffs during the 2008-2009 budget crisis.
I don't know what article you read, but it doesn't seem very accurate to me.
I earn 1/3 of that per year; My gross pay is less than $40,000/yr. If a "typical home" is too expensive for you to afford, the easiest, most commonsense answer is to move to LCOL with "atypical homes". Housing prices will fall in densely populated areas accordingly.
I'm in my 20s. I own my home and car. I make enough to pay my bills, live comfortably, and still have money being put towards savings and investments. I couldn’t support a family on my salary, but I can support myself just fine, with money left over.
Yes, you will take a pay cut. Yes, the work may be different. But you have work/life balance, housing is affordable and a realistic goal for young people, and every time you drive past a stranger on a gravel country road, they always wave at you. The people are literally golden-retriever-level friendly and very wholesome.
And the food? Oh my god, don’t get me started on the food! Forget having lots of restaurant options, because you won’t need ‘em. We’ve got little old Baptist ladies, and they want their food to send you straight to heaven. I once mentioned offhandedly that I’ve been craving chicken and dumplings, and the next day, a little old lady at work brought in an empty 1-gallon ice cream container of fresh chicken and dumplings. You can’t beat southern hospitality!
I realize uprooting your life and moving from the city to a rural area isn’t a realistic thing for many, if not most, people, but I promise you that if you can, your life will be better because of it.
Considering the active hostility of many places towards minorities, I have to wonder how well that wholesomeness holds up towards people who don't already look and act like the local community.
While it’s definitely not nonexistent, it is certainly very overstated. The loud voices get amplified the most, and that’s unfortunate.
Personally, I think there’s very little “active hostility” here anymore, but racism is still present in subtler ways, like ignorance or insensitivity, simply because most of the people have lived here their whole lives, there’s few non-white people, and haven’t had much cross-cultural experience. There isn’t malice so much as ignorance, but there’s less and less as time goes by. My workplace’s racial makeup is majority non-white, and all of these people are very happy to have moved their families here, even if they weren’t at first. We have a New York City transplant who had a tough time transitioning, but she came around! She hated that the closest club was 40 minutes away, lol
As long as you’re kind, respectful, and especially if you’re willing to attempt local culture (ever tried shooting a pound of Tannerite from 100 yards, just blowing shit up for fun? lol), 98% of people here in the south (in my southern area, at least) will welcome you with open arms. Especially those old ladies, they just want to feed you! :)
That sounds like a hot take by someone who hasn’t lived in such areas. Sort of like neighbors who have an hot take about “those people” when they’ve never met one of those people in their life. You do have to wonder about them…
I’d be interested in your personal experience regarding said “active hostility” in LCOL areas…in the year 2023. Or any objective broad based regional study about actual active hostility in LCOL areas in the 2020s in the US. Not “perceived”…sometimes the most dangerous bigot you face is the one inside your own head. Actual.
Moving to a new area with a strong sense of their own community values will always require some adjustment on both sides. But my experience is there is always more to be gained than lost, and you grow as a person as a result. Practically every part of the country have a community of like-minded citizens, no matter what “like-minded” means, and that helps quite a bit. It is easier to not be the very first but, even then, that’s what courage and leadership is all about. (Try not to get shot, though.)
Give the FUD spread about LCOL, it’s easy to weep at how many of us devolved from the pioneers who built houses, raised crops, children and communities with little more than a few hand tools, a couple pigs, a mule, some seed and a rifle. Not a perfect legacy, but a superior one. Must be why it’s such a popular international destination for so many looking for a better life.
It's a hot take, but it's one that comes from the context that 'wholesome' small towns in the Pacific Northwest will do things like spontaneously form armed posses to chase and detain random people based on wild rumors [1].
'the' local community doesn't exist in true rural areas. It's a mesh of multiple communities that will welcome you if you are interested, regardless of your origins.
I've been in west Virginia for a month, I guarantee that even amongst stereotypical 'rednecks', you'll have a hard time finding someone held back by skin color or origin. I get that I was mostly with hippies and probably in one of the most left-leaning community in the US, but beer, music festivals, farmer's market do not discriminate your political leaning.
In fact, my personal experience say that small-ish towns are way, way more racist and bigoted than rural areas. I'd say the more hierarchical a place is, the more likely you are to find racism, and small towns are the poster child of social hierarchy. Once it's too big, it's too complex to understand who's above who. Rural areas self-organize. Small towns are the worst for 'strangers'.
Depends on how much savings you have and how fast the house is raising, you cannot just say 114000 like a magic number. Likely another 10-20 important factors to know if you can afford a house.
So don't buy a typical home. My niece just bought a condo for $200k. It's not a "typical" home; it only has two bedrooms. But they can afford it on much less than $114k/yr.
If true, and it's kind of hard to believe, that represents a significant hike. In 2016 I was making $55,000 and qualified for a $206,000 home with zero down.
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[ 1498 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadIt would be much more interesting to know how far short the median income falls of median income needed to afford a home in that same region the income is earned - I think that's more insightful for an overall picture of how affordable houses are and you could do region by region comparisons.
I would hypothesize that even though the median income might be above that threshold or close to it in some regions like Manhattan and parts of the bay, the affordability gap would actually be greater in a large number of those relatively higher income regions than relatively lower income regions elsewhere
No home buyer isn't part of a region. Given that where you buy a home and where you live are very highly correlated, it's hard to tell if this is over or under stating the actual average experience. Your actual experience of housing affordability is regional not global.
In this case my hypothesis is that this number is actually an underestimate of how unaffordable housing is, though for all we know it could be that some significant regions like rural regions are more affordable. There's no way to tell from this number alone.
Our economy is deeply broken.
[1] Just under $71,000/year as of 2021.
And it wasn't just adopted/pushed by one political party . . .
The only real hope of progress here is for states to start outright overriding local laws around housing, as California has been increasingly doing.
[1] https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives... - take a look the linked report
This is also why rowhouses are so expensive: people like them, but in most US cities nobody is allowed to build new ones.
I'm seeing 512 1+ bedroom apartments in Manhattan for sale at $576,000 or less (4x $114k) [1].
[1] https://streeteasy.com/for-sale/manhattan/price:-576000%7Cbe...
DSM is pretty affordable but I'm 2 hours out and it's even better. Maybe that figure would make sense in MPLS.
I'm not sure why you're fear mongering, but stop.
If FIs decide they hate me I know enough JD Edwards to consult in that realm instead.
Primarily, the only buyers in this hyperlocal market are rich people who move money from overseas because locals cannot afford it. Occasionally, there are the lucky few who survived and exited a startup or inherited wealth dot the landscape.
That number seems really low. Here in Seattle, the median home price is $804k, and a third of that is about $268k. I'm ignoring the down payment, but you get the idea.
And we're not the most expensive market by any means. If this number is an aggregation, I guess that's somewhat better news for people outside the cities.
And by outside the city, I mean 2-3 hours by car. Just moving to the next county isn't enough.
I also wonder what they mean by a "typical" home. Do they mean typical in terms of price, regardless of square footage or unit type, or do they mean "typical" in the sense of a 3/2 single occupancy dwelling with a certain square footage and yard size, etc.?
To everyone else it's a disaster.
Price signals work if supply can raise to meet demand. When house prices go up it becomes more profitable to build, etc. But when the supply side mechanism is blocked for a necessity then prices will just go up, and up, and up… especially if it can also be bought on leverage.
Since the 1950s vehicle prices have more than doubled, adj for inflation
Here's how entry level pickup trucks fared: https://www.thedrive.com/news/34333/heres-how-much-the-ford-...
Over 100 years, the bedroom-to-sq-foot ratio shrunk. That sucks hard in an economy where it takes 4 typical incomes to pay minimal bills.
$57k per person? That's median income for full time workers.
People online act like you gotta pay childcare for the rest of time once you have a baby.
This is your quote, there's a lot of sarcasm which makes it awkward to directly quote but we can all see the point your trying to get across. Society "won't lift a finger" for parents with young children.
But they do the child tax credit, and not only that, it's even more generous for children age 5 and under! So they do "lift a finger to contribute to the future tax slaves until they're five" in your direct words.
According to BLS, 53% of households are dual income, 66% of households with children are dual income. The difference, according to the BLS, is that old retired people are often single income and don't have kids. But retired people are generally not in the market as first time homebuyers anyway.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/comparing-characte...
So frankly, it would be fair to say that the vast majority of american families ARE dual income.
I can't find figures for this with BLS, but Rocket Mortgage who has a lot of data on american family and homebuyer incomes says that the average dual income family WITH kids brings in $129k per year. Even higher for DINKs. Now this is average not median, but I think it's still paints the broad picture I'm trying to communicate. I doubt median is half the average.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dinks-average-salary-138-000-...
There is no argument from me that buying a house on one income can be difficult. But my original comment way up at the top specifically says dual income households.
I'm not misunderstanding it, you're just continually citing an irrelevant data point comment after comment. This whole time, I have been talking about dual income households. You can tell me median household income figures until youre blue in the face; I am only talking about dual income household figures. They aren't the same thing.
Median household income includes dual income but also single income households. I only want to consider dual income households, because that's who I said can reasonably meet the $114k figure.
Pew research
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-gr...
Dual income is nice, but the ability for one or the other to not have to work (sickness, travel, sabbatical) would be really nice. Or just having the ability to live alone and not throw away money into rent.
It's that high because a toll lane was built to the nearest metropolitan city so the urbanites priced out of living close to their jobs could flood surrounding areas without the city needing to expand housing.
Meanwhile, our young graduates and public servants can't afford a mortgage in the town they work for, and the wealthy families either vote their enclaves to be exclusive receivers of local taxes, or else they carve themselves out to merge with the county of the metro area so they can siphon off their services, instead.
You think $57K is trivial, but wealth inequality is draining local workers dry.
This is pretty much how I managed to afford a house when corona/fed blasted everything to oblivion...
Interesting. I wonder what it is for Seattle then.
> The median listing home price in Seattle, WA was $829K in September 2023, trending down -2.5% year-over-year. The median listing home price per square foot was $584. The median home sold price was $799.5K.
Says redfin (https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Seattle_WA...).
Seattle median household income is ~115,000 according to Seattle times (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-media...). This means that one of the highest earning cities in the U.S. isn't able to comfortably afford a home, even at median prices. So then I wonder how many people are moving into Seattle with high incomes in order to buy homes and such.
It's also very surprising to me that the median home sold price in Seattle is more than New York City.
i.e. to afford a home roughly twice the price of the median in that analysis, it would take ~$230k salary to afford a home in Seattle.
My wife and I combined make about that, and that seems about right. Though, IMO the debt-to-income ratios that they consider "normal" for these types of analyses leave one further extended than I'd like to be. (Childcare isn't cheap!)
Surprised me too but then it seems more reasonable when you see media listing home price per sqft in New York is $780 compared to Seattle's $584. New Yorkers are just buying smaller places.
Given current interest rates, an American getting a mortgage today is going to be paying something like $2,000/month more just in interest than they were in early 2021, which is when I bought my house in Seattle.
At $799,000, you're looking at a monthly payment around $5,800/month. The definition of being cost-burdened on housing is when you spend more than 30% of your gross income on housing. That means you'd need a gross monthly income of $19,333 or $232,000 annually to not be rent-burdened in Seattle buying a median priced home.
The simple fact, as unpalatable as it may be, is that buying a home is always "expensive". In the US anyway, the price seems to be set by people's income. That is, their ability to pay. What does change is the size and quality of the homes.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
[2] https://www.getrichslowly.org/homeownership/
The cohorts are all that matter here... so do the incoming cohorts own less than the older cohorts at their age. The answer is YES by a great deal!
I'd like to find the definition of the measure, it may or may not be commonsense. For example, the unemployment rate does not track the count of unemployed people.
15 years ago was the height of the housing bubble. They were right.
Two years later, housing prices were sharply lower and so was the level of complaining.
More recently, people with money in the bank found themselves homeless and we had complaining again. Because being homeless sucks.
Yes, because the current set of of homeowners includes people from many different years and therefore hole buying difficulties. It’s not very relevant to compare it to a figure for how currently difficult it is to buy a home.
> Renter-occupied housing units increased at over twice the rate of owner-occupied housing units.
> Between 2010 and 2020, renter-occupied units grew from 40.7 million units to 46.8 million units, a growth rate of 14.8 percent. Over the same period, owner-occupied units increased 5.4 percent, from 76.0 million owner-occupied units to 80.1 million units.
> Renter-occupied housing units also increased at a faster rate than owner-occupied units between 2000 and 2010,when the nation experienced a 14.2 percent increase in rental units and an 8.8 percent increase in owner-occupied units.
> Since 2000, renter-occupied units increased 31.1 percent, while owner-occupied units increased 14.7 percent.
> The 2020 homeownership rate [63.1%] was the lowest it has been since 1970.
Source: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2020/...
Size and quality don't change for pre-existing stock. There are a lot of crappy ranch houses that cost 1.3-1.8 MM now.
This isn't a "woe is me" statement, I love my job, have other sources of income, and will be fine. Many of my coworkers are not so lucky. Our comically ineffective union just negotiated a new contract with a 10% raise over 3 years. That will likely be less than inflation. Public employee job postings stay open for months because it is so difficult to recruit anyone. More and more people move into private industry where they do little to serve the public but are more fairly compensated. More broadly, in the Bay Area, there are a small group of professionals who make a decent salary, and then there is everyone else. Something has to give eventually. I worry what that will look like.
I'd love to see the math on this claim.
0.01 * (years of service) * (final compensation)
Where final compensation is usually an average over your last 36 months.
If your final compensation is 120k, and you have worked in a state job for 30 years, your annual pension would be $36,000
Pay raises are NOT guaranteed. The last general salary increase I had was in 2021. There can be layoffs, although they are rare, and in some cases you may have retreat rights. There were layoffs during the 2008-2009 budget crisis.
I don't know what article you read, but it doesn't seem very accurate to me.
I'm in my 20s. I own my home and car. I make enough to pay my bills, live comfortably, and still have money being put towards savings and investments. I couldn’t support a family on my salary, but I can support myself just fine, with money left over.
Yes, you will take a pay cut. Yes, the work may be different. But you have work/life balance, housing is affordable and a realistic goal for young people, and every time you drive past a stranger on a gravel country road, they always wave at you. The people are literally golden-retriever-level friendly and very wholesome.
And the food? Oh my god, don’t get me started on the food! Forget having lots of restaurant options, because you won’t need ‘em. We’ve got little old Baptist ladies, and they want their food to send you straight to heaven. I once mentioned offhandedly that I’ve been craving chicken and dumplings, and the next day, a little old lady at work brought in an empty 1-gallon ice cream container of fresh chicken and dumplings. You can’t beat southern hospitality!
I realize uprooting your life and moving from the city to a rural area isn’t a realistic thing for many, if not most, people, but I promise you that if you can, your life will be better because of it.
Personally, I think there’s very little “active hostility” here anymore, but racism is still present in subtler ways, like ignorance or insensitivity, simply because most of the people have lived here their whole lives, there’s few non-white people, and haven’t had much cross-cultural experience. There isn’t malice so much as ignorance, but there’s less and less as time goes by. My workplace’s racial makeup is majority non-white, and all of these people are very happy to have moved their families here, even if they weren’t at first. We have a New York City transplant who had a tough time transitioning, but she came around! She hated that the closest club was 40 minutes away, lol
As long as you’re kind, respectful, and especially if you’re willing to attempt local culture (ever tried shooting a pound of Tannerite from 100 yards, just blowing shit up for fun? lol), 98% of people here in the south (in my southern area, at least) will welcome you with open arms. Especially those old ladies, they just want to feed you! :)
I’d be interested in your personal experience regarding said “active hostility” in LCOL areas…in the year 2023. Or any objective broad based regional study about actual active hostility in LCOL areas in the 2020s in the US. Not “perceived”…sometimes the most dangerous bigot you face is the one inside your own head. Actual.
Moving to a new area with a strong sense of their own community values will always require some adjustment on both sides. But my experience is there is always more to be gained than lost, and you grow as a person as a result. Practically every part of the country have a community of like-minded citizens, no matter what “like-minded” means, and that helps quite a bit. It is easier to not be the very first but, even then, that’s what courage and leadership is all about. (Try not to get shot, though.)
Give the FUD spread about LCOL, it’s easy to weep at how many of us devolved from the pioneers who built houses, raised crops, children and communities with little more than a few hand tools, a couple pigs, a mule, some seed and a rifle. Not a perfect legacy, but a superior one. Must be why it’s such a popular international destination for so many looking for a better life.
[1]: https://www.peninsuladailynews.com/crime/family-harassed-in-...
I've been in west Virginia for a month, I guarantee that even amongst stereotypical 'rednecks', you'll have a hard time finding someone held back by skin color or origin. I get that I was mostly with hippies and probably in one of the most left-leaning community in the US, but beer, music festivals, farmer's market do not discriminate your political leaning.
In fact, my personal experience say that small-ish towns are way, way more racist and bigoted than rural areas. I'd say the more hierarchical a place is, the more likely you are to find racism, and small towns are the poster child of social hierarchy. Once it's too big, it's too complex to understand who's above who. Rural areas self-organize. Small towns are the worst for 'strangers'.
That was when fertility was last above replacement level. House-price-to-income started rising in the late 1960s and has not stopped.
This problem will self-correct in the long run. There will be fewer people than houses.
1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...