Aziz Sunderji - The Geography of Housing Affordability
Portuguese FishI’ve just returned from Portugal. On the west coast of the country, where we were celebrating a wedding, you can get a spectacular 5-course fish dinner for under $20. That’s because, in Portugal, productivity—and incomes—are very low. Sure, supply might play a part: fish are abundant off the Portuguese coast. But fish are also abundant off the coast of Monaco, where prices are much higher. Incomes are the dominant factor. Housing AffordabilityThis is the lens through which I look at the housing affordability problem in the United States. Housing costs are high in places where incomes are high. Because the distribution of incomes is unequal, many households spend a high proportion of their income on housing. And this is primarily a big-city phenomenon. The chart below shows the proportion of gross income that households (owners and renters) spend on housing, bucketed by income level and by metro area¹ size (ranked from largest to smallest). Conventionally, when households spend 30% of their income on housing, they are said to be “housing burdened”. The income levels corresponding to that threshold in each city are indicated with a black box. The results of the analysis confirm my priors, but some things stood out:
1 Labels are shortened versions of the full metro area name. Eg, Los Angeles represents “Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA”. For metro areas smaller than 2.9 million, the names displayed are one of many metros that fall into that population size bucket (rounded to the nearest 100k). For example, the row corresponding to 2.8 million is labelled St. Louis, but it could as easily have been labeled Baltimore. Home Economics is a reader-supported publication. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support our work. Paying clients receive access to the full archive, forecasts, data sets, and exclusive in-depth analysis. This edition is free—you can forward it to colleagues who appreciate concise, data-driven housing analysis. |
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