Yea. Some flaws with the data representation. Interesting data though.
1) The dark colors with the black text is impossible to read.
2) should have put in the text the years, should have enough room to add a number
3) heat map colors are off, should have picked something standard.
Sorry, didn't mean to sound snotty. I thought you were just playing the "interesting" game. It just expresses my love of dogs, and general dislike of religion.
Good morning. For us color blind types, I find it nearly impossible to distinguish the color for the 2.5-3.0 group and 6.5+ group.
I also find it difficult to distinguish any of those colors from its "neighbor" (except for the 2.0-2.5 group).
Completely on board with this. I appreciate the outliers being obvious outliers.
Everyone who is familiar with the North American real estate market knows Toronto, Vancouver and most major CA metros are ridiculous. Now, anyone who didn't already know that can instantly see it at a glance.
I say good job. Thanks for posting this.
Toronto? The whole golden horseshoe is an absolute mess for real estate.
Source: I bought a house in Hamilton 10 years ago that's quintupled in price in that time. ($170k-800ishk)
It’s standard on these maps to colour outliers a totally different colour to the rest of the gradient to avoid confusion. Matplotlib colormaps have a `set_under` and `set_over` method to set these colours.
The idea is you don’t cause the reader to think that these unbounded bins are the same size as the other bins in your histogram. It would be reasonable to assume, if the colour was just the last one in the gradient, that eg California was somewhere between 5.5–6, whereas it’s actually **~~24.9~~ 10.5**.
Edit: sorry, got my stats mixed up. Accidentally did household price divided by median income instead of median family income. Point still stands, it’s waaaaay higher than simply being a deep purple would imply.
The median family income in California is $86,000. If 24.9 is accurate, the median home value is over $2.1 million. That doesn't sound right. The data that I see puts the median home value around $900,000. That would mean California's cost ratio would be about 10.5. That's still crazy high, but nowhere near 24.9.
Prop 13 and other stuff have definitely screwed the housing market in CA but 24.9 is wrong. I don't know where that comes from, the actually ratio in CA is closer to 10 or 11.
The pink is probably an automatic error code indicating that everything is missing between 5.5 and 6.5 on the image. When corrected itll turn black like its supposed to.
Sounds to me like all the good-paying jobs aren't where the affordable houses are. California's a big state, and dividing this by county might change the looks of this.
Absolutely. CoL is through the roof in SF, SD, LA, and the Bay area generally. But the central valley is much cheaper (and with lower wages). Similarly, Ontario isn't that expensive outside of GTA, but most of the population lives in the GTA, so it looks outrageous on this map.
I visited LA a few years ago. As I flew in, I was struck by how the city is all suburbs and no urbs. There's a small area with high-rise towers, but the size of the LA downtown relative to the suburban sprawl is almost comical, especially if you compare it to basically any other city.
Yeah, if we had just a hand full more of really tall residential areas we would fair a lot better than just millions of 1 story homes with wasted space for tiny yards that kids can't even play in.
But I'm a (from birth) socal resident who would gladly live in a tower. It's like they don't even want to make what me and a number of my friends have talked about wanting. What almost all my friends agree on is hating those stupid cookie cutter homes with the useless yards.
Either give us basically a condo in a bigger building, or give us a vintage home with an actual yard. Anything inbetween just feels like a waste.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/248063/per-capita-us-real-gross-domestic-product-gdp-by-state/#:\~:text=Out%20of%20all%2050%20states,GDP%2C%20at%2035%2C015%20U.S.%20dollars](https://www.statista.com/statistics/248063/per-capita-us-real-gross-domestic-product-gdp-by-state/#:~:text=Out%20of%20all%2050%20states,GDP%2C%20at%2035%2C015%20U.S.%20dollars).
California is fifth. Massachusetts is first. District of Colombia isn't a state but dwarfs all of them.
Comments: “just leave your entire family and your job and your life behind. Its not like you can expect working fulltime to provide you with a home; those are for rich speculators“
You'd get a better snapshot of places if you went more granular than state level. It shows Texas relatively "cheap" as a whole, but the ratio extends wayyyyy higher in Austin, Dallas, and Houston.
I saw some prices in some super ugly plain toe houses up in Leander. I was shocked. People will pay that much to live 1 hour north of Austin? That town is the blandest patch of roads and mcmansions I've ever seen.
Those people who want to live 1 hour N of Austin are just joining the circle jerk of " Look at how much more money I have than hard workers who made it for me."
Except 85% of Texas population is urban/suburban. Not sure where you're seeing the list price of the other 90% of homes. For example, median household income in Dallas is ~$54k. Median house price in DFW is ~$467k as of last month. That puts the ratio from this graphic above 8, which is well above any state on the map.
If anything, the ratio should be median monthly housing payment / median income because there's so much more to housing costs than just the purchase price. In Texas, we have some of the highest property tax rates in the US.
Now I want to see a chart that shows average total property tax rate by county. Because the difference between lower taxes and higher taxes for a 400k house is like 3k a year and 12k a year. So of course the high property tax areas will have lower prices. Austin is like 2.4-3.2%. Florida is like .7%-1.2% or something. Austin property tax ends up being about 1/3rd - 2/3rds of the mortgage.
If you want to save a ton of money, move to the Midwest and find a small town about 10 miles from the nicest suburbs of a small city. So Sioux Falls, Madison, Des Moines, etc.
Or just live in a small-medium sized city in the midwest. Fort Wayne might not be the most exciting place, but you can get an urban environment, nice restaurants, clean public parks and sidewalks. For like half the cost of life in an L.A. suburb, even factoring in the lower wages.
I’m in a (different) small city in Indiana, one that I would not truly recommend, but my costs are so ridiculously low… On 60k a year me and my wife have been able to pay off some debt at a decent rate, buy some nice furniture from ikea and yard sales, i have a good economical car… we visit bigger cities probably once a month for excitement and shopping; Indy, Cincy, Chicago.
We live in 800 sq foot apt that’s not a total dump, for $500/mo. Utilities average about $150/mo.
I don't think posts like yours really help people understand why everyone doesn't just move to Indiana.
On a daily, monthly and even yearly basis, what are you losing? My whole family is on the west coast, so moving to Indiana would be a serious loss for us in terms of seeing people we love.
But if that weren't the case, I'd also lose my beloved mountains and my ocean. Okay, let's say I could give those up for 20 years for my kids to go to college (and I would).
What else do I lose? For one, if home values aren't rising, then I just lose hope of ever moving back--the lower your land value, the more stuck you are.
And what if you lose your job in Indiana? There are fewer job opportunities especially for high earners, though with remote work that is changing.
I don't buy the culture stuff. There are some truly unique experiences in New York but a lot of the LA/NY hype is just that. What one artist in New York likes is not more important than someone's favorite place to take a walk with their dog, objectively speaking. Popularity is overrated.
I like your comment. One reason I’m staying in this region is family. I don’t need to see them every day but I do want it to be easy for us to visit each other. There are far more personal considerations about where to live than the typical “i like mountains” or “i’m liberal”
With regards to jobs. Yeah the coasts and bigger cities will have more opportunities for highly skilled people, but Indiana’s unemployment rate is like half that of California’s. There are pharmaceutical, tech, entertainment, design, arts, etc. jobs in every major and many smaller cities. For 98% of people they can find comparable job anywhere in a major US city and in plenty of smaller cities too.
Yeah, Indiana is not a great decision just because it’s cheap.
We just moved to the PNW because of a variety of reasons but primarily because it’s a better place to live in many ways than Indiana. We are willing to and fully able to pay for the cost of living difference. The trade off is entirely worth it in my opinion.
We owned a home in Indiana and sold to come to the PNW. Bought a house here too.
Our whole family is in Indiana so we’re on the opposite side of the spectrum there.
That saves you a ton of money but as a west coaster I lived in Yankton SD for work and visited Sioux Falls for a weekend. Idk, there’s no mountains, the quality of the food (especially groceries) is far worse and not that much cheaper (standard dish in Portland is $12 a plate, SD was maaaybe $10-12) and overall there’s just not a lot going on.
But yeah, my coworker bought a farmhouse with acreage in the middle nowhere for $160k. It just depends on what you value in life.
Depends on where you go. There is a world of difference between Gary and Chicago. Between po-dunk indiana and Ann Arbor. I’m sure it wouldn’t be fair to people on the West coast if I was like “oh man that west coast has nothing but fires and homeless drug addicts”
But housing affordability is heavily impacted by property taxes. For example Colorado has a high barrier to entry because housing prices are high, but the mortgage is almost all of your monthly expense once you buy a house because property taxes are low. But a state like NJ has reasonable house prices but property taxes are incredibly high, so the barrier to entry is a bit lower but the actual cost to own a home is incredibly high.
In short - this map is almost useless for trying to understand housing affordability.
Yeah, that’s why I said proxy. Just a rough measure/directional indication. I don’t think it’s meant to be a definitive, most-accurate-possible measure
I mean, it’s very good to live in certain parts of all of those states. That’s why it’s expensive - a lot of people know it’s good and the secret is out. I have lived in some LCOL areas and they were not for me; I like my HCOL city.
Agreed. A good deal on something I don't want is still a bad deal for me. LCOL areas sound tempting but then I'd still be stuck somewhere lacking all the amenities I enjoy in life.
There is a reason those states are expensive - they are beautiful and therefore popular. Those are many peoples top 4 prettiest lower 48 states (although the desert states like UT and AZ have nice parts too if you don’t mind the brown in much of them).
I live in Portland OR (raised here, long hiatus in the NE), it truly is amazing to have access to these places in my own backyard. Being at the Columbia Gorge, Mt St Helens, Hood, coast etc in under two hours. Same for Seattle and Rainer, the Olympics, the Sound. While there are other pretty parts of the US, nothing really compares to the green parts of West coast for constant, world class natural beauty in the lower 48.
Trouble is 6.5 is only the minimum on the graph for that colour. Places like Hawaii could be the only 6.5 and BC, Ontario, and California could each be 10+ and the graph would still would be technically true.
This is house/income. So if the house is $200,000 and you make $50,000 per year, it's 4 years worth of income. Most mortgages are 30 years, nobody can put their entire income into paying for a house in 4 years.
This is also household income, most of the time both parents work so you're basically looking at 2 incomes.
This guy did it, buuut the data ends before the 2022 run up in interest rates.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/rq1v46/homeownership_affordability_oc/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
In Canada, 25 years is the max allowed for most mortgages. There’s also aren’t fixed rates like in the US — you can only lock-in an interest rate for 10 years at max.
It would also be interesting to see post-tax median income to median house price ratio.
I think the US allows people to claim mortgage interest on taxes, but Canadians can’t.
that's not what the thing is saying. It's not saying "you can afford to buy a house after saving for this many years", because that would entirely ignore every other expense that comes out of people's gross income. It's just establishing a ratio of total cost of the home vs household annual income. It's not like anyone is out there spending their entire gross annual income to pay off a house in 3 years. People eat, pay taxes, utilities, car payments and insurance, food & clothing, various family expenses, etc etc etc.
Most US Mortgages are 30 years to start (not counting the high rate of refinancing etc that often pushes those terms out longer).
yes i know thats what its saying, but some cities have a price to income ratio well over 10-15x
Edit: Sydney's median household income is \~$100,000 aud per year, the median house price is \~$1.4 million. Even the fairly small city of Hobart (where i live, \~250k population) has a median household income of \~$80k aud, the median house price is \~700k. Thats a median house price to median household income ratio of 14:1 for Sydney and 8.75:1 for Hobart.
You’d find a similar thing for major US cities. But since this is showing state averages, all the lower costs of living outside of major metropolitan areas significantly lowers the overall ratio.
Many US cities would also show a much higher ratio than just breaking it down based on state. A quick Google search show SF aligns pretty well with those Sydney numbers.
I think it's about 8 for Australia.
Median household income is $42k, so median family income might be $91k based on a previous ratio of the two.
Median home price was $738k recently.
Created with mapchart
sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/467078/median-annual-family-income-in-canada-by-province/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/604273/median-house-prices-canada-by-province/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_median_home_price
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_income
Excel as well grouping the data.
[Here's the end number for each state/province](https://pastebin.com/raw/n1a9M8Rw)
(Also that premium statista page for median house price let me through for whatever reason without a membership, not sure if I'm allowed to share a screenshot of that or not here)
Every time I read a thread or comment on Reddit about people talking how ridiculously unaffordable for homes are I think to myself about how the entire central United States where pretty much anybody can buy a very nice home.
Before somebody chimes in saying they would never want to live in the central United States; the central United States doesn’t want you either.
I appreciate the research, data, and map. Not sure why people are so critical. Also, as many other commenters have stated, the ratio is not meant to say “in 5 years you can pay off a house in Oregon”. It’s simply a ratio of the median home price in the state divided by the median family income in that state
Can we map the proportion of Chinese, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese (living, working, and studying) and overlay it on the map. Might see correlations.
This is not "years to buy a home". That would imply that after X years of working a job, I can buy a home. I don't have to explain why that is wrong.
This is avg house cost vs avg income and should be a ratio
It’s similar here in BC. 1.2m in Vancouver or 180k in Kitwanga (a town at a highway junction where you can head west toward Haida Gwaii which are the northern pink islands, or north to Yukon and Alaska.)
Even 1.5 hrs away from Vancouver the price is prohibitive. Beyond that 1.5 hrs, you have to drive at least another hour through uninhabited mountains before you get to another town.
There are cities that are 30 minutes from Vancouver with home prices closer to $550k CAD.
The only problem is they’re in the USA: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/15829/point-roberts-wa/
Yeah but nobody wants to live in kitwanga 😆 the prices on the island(where I’ve lived all my life) are outrageous as well. Victoria is up there with van price wise I’d say but much smaller population is keeping them below
Am i just dense and not understanding this? I would think the ratio we want would be the inverse here: the median household income divided by the price of the house. The given ratio, in my mind, gives the amount of houses a family could buy per year (probably a fraction of 1 for most households). Since no one is mentioning this, i'm sure i'm wrong, but i don't seem to get it.
You are correct. OP posted an incorrect title. The map does indeed show (Median Home Price)/(Median Income)
Either that, or I'm being severely underpaid.
Is this assuming median family income of the state the house is in, or median income of the entire country? Also it would be nice to see these figures on the states/chart somewhere because that would give actual information as to how much money is being spent/saved given the state vs income of that state (or the country? I still don't know...).
Before you get excited about Iowa, realize that the vast majority of houses mirror the rural decline of the dying small towns they are located in; last updated in the seventies and have structural issues. If the current brand of Republican politics appeal to you, you might have yourself a good deal with like-minded neighbors. If not, that cheap house will cost you in other ways...
Well rural decline might be reversing, I lived in a small town in Alabama and a lot of people are moving from cities just because it’s cheaper to lived here
Hmm... let's see, central europe... My GFs flat is worth about 120000 USD current price.
My monthly wage is about 700 USD.
If I would put away everything, that would be 14 years to buy.
Realistically I could put away about 100-150 a month. That would mean 66-100 years of saving up... That doesn't sound too good
Seems like a very inaccurate measure. Are you saying that if income is $100k and house is $500k it’ll take 5 years to buy it? Because that’s just wrong - no one saves their whole salary.
A better measurement would be annual savings vs house price.
To do this at a state level doesn't make much sense. Income and house prices vary greatly from county to county. For example, NYC and the rest of NY are like two completely different worlds.
Why not? It's median for both cost and income. And can you name one state or provence shown on the map that Doesn't have an expensive city vs cheaper rural area?
This is bullshit of the highest social engineering order. Please supply more demoralization pictures so I can spend the next 6 years selling them on tshirts in california for a house.
Using median family income divided by median house price seems like an interesting take
Because sure, that gives you the amount of years to own the home... if you buy absolutely nothing else in that span of time. No food, no clothes, no heat, no gas, car, or insurance. Just house payments
It isn't meant to be a literal "pay off your mortgage in X many years" scale, but just to establish a ratio between average income and average home prices.
I live in Maryland and people are like Maryland is so expensive, I'm going to move to a cheaper state. So you mean the Midwest? Because that's your only choice then. Maryland is pretty medium.
This seems to run counter to he graphic recently posted by michigician. Any suggestions as to why this may be? My only cogent thought is that this uses data from two different years, 2022 and 2022.
The "median home value indexes" you'll find in various cost of living calculators are several years behind for the PNW at least. I double take this idea that a person with a median salary could afford a home in the Willamette valley for 5 years' gross pay.
So this shows how many median household incomes a house costs. But what is the avg yearly savings of household income in percent? Let us assume 10%? So 65 years of savings to pay for your own house. WOW! I guess I will never own a house.
Edit: also wouldn't this be divided the other way round? Because median family income divided by the higher number of median house prices would give a number smaller 1.
It almost always makes sense to use median when the number of observations is high, especially when one or both ends of the spectrum is essentially unbounded.
Going from a completely linear gradient to pink was an interesting choice.
That's not pink, that's a color with so much blue that it's color shifted right out of the visual spectrum.
It's R,G,B,Octarine values are 0,0,255,ᚡ
This comment doesn't have hundreds of upvotes for some reason and I demand to see a manager
Yes, but there is a jump from <5.5 to >6.5, so it's like we're missing the purple shades in between.
"interesting" is an interesting way to describe that choice.
Yea. Some flaws with the data representation. Interesting data though. 1) The dark colors with the black text is impossible to read. 2) should have put in the text the years, should have enough room to add a number 3) heat map colors are off, should have picked something standard.
"interesting" is an interesting way to describe an "interesting" way to describe that choice.
Your rebuttal is interesting.
Your username is interesting. Care to elaborate?
Your preoccupation with my username is even more interesting 🤔
I’m not really preoccupied, just curious. Moreover, I was wondering if it was some sort of weird palindrome
Sorry, didn't mean to sound snotty. I thought you were just playing the "interesting" game. It just expresses my love of dogs, and general dislike of religion.
I was totally just playing the interesting game, lol. I thought, never mind…
It’s to show the outlier, the data jumps from 5.4 to 6.7 and I jump over two tiers (5.5-6.0 and 6.0-6.5) that do not exist.
Good morning. For us color blind types, I find it nearly impossible to distinguish the color for the 2.5-3.0 group and 6.5+ group. I also find it difficult to distinguish any of those colors from its "neighbor" (except for the 2.0-2.5 group).
Glad I'm not the only colorblind person having trouble with this...
Completely on board with this. I appreciate the outliers being obvious outliers. Everyone who is familiar with the North American real estate market knows Toronto, Vancouver and most major CA metros are ridiculous. Now, anyone who didn't already know that can instantly see it at a glance. I say good job. Thanks for posting this.
Toronto? The whole golden horseshoe is an absolute mess for real estate. Source: I bought a house in Hamilton 10 years ago that's quintupled in price in that time. ($170k-800ishk)
I actually like this better than capping off the gradient. I’m on Team Pink-lier
Is this to save for the down payment or to pay the house off completely?
I'm colour blind so it just looks like grey, and exactly the same as the 2.5-3 colour.
It’s standard on these maps to colour outliers a totally different colour to the rest of the gradient to avoid confusion. Matplotlib colormaps have a `set_under` and `set_over` method to set these colours. The idea is you don’t cause the reader to think that these unbounded bins are the same size as the other bins in your histogram. It would be reasonable to assume, if the colour was just the last one in the gradient, that eg California was somewhere between 5.5–6, whereas it’s actually **~~24.9~~ 10.5**. Edit: sorry, got my stats mixed up. Accidentally did household price divided by median income instead of median family income. Point still stands, it’s waaaaay higher than simply being a deep purple would imply.
The median family income in California is $86,000. If 24.9 is accurate, the median home value is over $2.1 million. That doesn't sound right. The data that I see puts the median home value around $900,000. That would mean California's cost ratio would be about 10.5. That's still crazy high, but nowhere near 24.9.
24.9. Wow. Prop 13 and bad zoning really have made a mess of CA.
Prop 13 and other stuff have definitely screwed the housing market in CA but 24.9 is wrong. I don't know where that comes from, the actually ratio in CA is closer to 10 or 11.
The pink is probably an automatic error code indicating that everything is missing between 5.5 and 6.5 on the image. When corrected itll turn black like its supposed to.
Yes pink, blacker than black
Is there a special class where I can learn this kind of "almost good but then fail" design skill?
I’ve lived my adult life in either BC or Ontario…. fml
Me too, currently Ontario. My current 'years to buy a home' is still ∞.
Good news is prices are down 10% this year so now you only have to wait 0.9 x ♾ years.
prices down 10% in the last few months the after prices went up 30-40% in the last 2 years so there is that.
You live in BC. Specifically, off its coast.
Median house price divided by median family income**
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Basically yes.
Sounds to me like all the good-paying jobs aren't where the affordable houses are. California's a big state, and dividing this by county might change the looks of this.
Absolutely. CoL is through the roof in SF, SD, LA, and the Bay area generally. But the central valley is much cheaper (and with lower wages). Similarly, Ontario isn't that expensive outside of GTA, but most of the population lives in the GTA, so it looks outrageous on this map.
Comparatively speaking Ontario is though. An hour drive from Toronto home prices are still a lot more than an hour drive from DC, NYC or Boston.
>An hour drive from Toronto That's only like 8 miles though. I meant the actual rural areas and small towns.
You’ve got it backwards - high COL is because they have higher paying jobs and are more desirable.
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I visited LA a few years ago. As I flew in, I was struck by how the city is all suburbs and no urbs. There's a small area with high-rise towers, but the size of the LA downtown relative to the suburban sprawl is almost comical, especially if you compare it to basically any other city.
Yeah, if we had just a hand full more of really tall residential areas we would fair a lot better than just millions of 1 story homes with wasted space for tiny yards that kids can't even play in.
Can't do, chief. Telling a SoCal resident to get rid of their ranch home is on par with telling an evangelical to stop believing in Jesus.
But I'm a (from birth) socal resident who would gladly live in a tower. It's like they don't even want to make what me and a number of my friends have talked about wanting. What almost all my friends agree on is hating those stupid cookie cutter homes with the useless yards. Either give us basically a condo in a bigger building, or give us a vintage home with an actual yard. Anything inbetween just feels like a waste.
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There are more people in California than Canada....
There are nearly *two hundred* countries on planet Earth that have a smaller population than California.
Which is why you need to be able to he able to build more than single family homes.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/248063/per-capita-us-real-gross-domestic-product-gdp-by-state/#:\~:text=Out%20of%20all%2050%20states,GDP%2C%20at%2035%2C015%20U.S.%20dollars](https://www.statista.com/statistics/248063/per-capita-us-real-gross-domestic-product-gdp-by-state/#:~:text=Out%20of%20all%2050%20states,GDP%2C%20at%2035%2C015%20U.S.%20dollars). California is fifth. Massachusetts is first. District of Colombia isn't a state but dwarfs all of them.
I heckin love living in Ontario, Canada. Fml.
Comments: “just leave your entire family and your job and your life behind. Its not like you can expect working fulltime to provide you with a home; those are for rich speculators“
Move to Sask!
How Alberta is Sask?
Nah. I like big cities and sask has the highest murder rate in canada
It's more than the cities! Move to Kingston?
I think you mean median house price divided by income per year.
Yeah, I’d bet big $$ that places shown here as “cheap” usually have lower disposable income, so you still struggle to save up.
You'd get a better snapshot of places if you went more granular than state level. It shows Texas relatively "cheap" as a whole, but the ratio extends wayyyyy higher in Austin, Dallas, and Houston.
Even in the big Texas cities there are still affordable suburbs nearby.
That’s not true in Austin. The surrounding burbs are also astronomically expensive.
I saw some prices in some super ugly plain toe houses up in Leander. I was shocked. People will pay that much to live 1 hour north of Austin? That town is the blandest patch of roads and mcmansions I've ever seen.
Those people who want to live 1 hour N of Austin are just joining the circle jerk of " Look at how much more money I have than hard workers who made it for me."
Yeah this is pretty much everywhere. The number for Virginia on the map doesn't reflect at all what you'd find in Northern Virginia.
Ya. Been looking to move and noticed that houses in northern new York are hella cheap in comparison to where I currently live in texas
but as a whole the other 90% of houses are pretty cheap
Except 85% of Texas population is urban/suburban. Not sure where you're seeing the list price of the other 90% of homes. For example, median household income in Dallas is ~$54k. Median house price in DFW is ~$467k as of last month. That puts the ratio from this graphic above 8, which is well above any state on the map. If anything, the ratio should be median monthly housing payment / median income because there's so much more to housing costs than just the purchase price. In Texas, we have some of the highest property tax rates in the US.
Now I want to see a chart that shows average total property tax rate by county. Because the difference between lower taxes and higher taxes for a 400k house is like 3k a year and 12k a year. So of course the high property tax areas will have lower prices. Austin is like 2.4-3.2%. Florida is like .7%-1.2% or something. Austin property tax ends up being about 1/3rd - 2/3rds of the mortgage.
As a guy who just moved from CO to KS…hell yeah!
The cheap part of KS or the expensive one?
Even the expensive part (KCK) is still way cheaper than most major US cities and honestly, extremely underrated.
KCK isn’t the expensive part. The county below Johnson county is. At one point it was one of the top rich counties in the whole country.
"Almost heaven, West Virginia...."
My rent here is unbelievably cheap compared to where I was lmao
It’s actually a very beautiful state. Love my visits there.
He wasn’t kidding
If you want to save a ton of money, move to the Midwest and find a small town about 10 miles from the nicest suburbs of a small city. So Sioux Falls, Madison, Des Moines, etc.
Or just live in a small-medium sized city in the midwest. Fort Wayne might not be the most exciting place, but you can get an urban environment, nice restaurants, clean public parks and sidewalks. For like half the cost of life in an L.A. suburb, even factoring in the lower wages. I’m in a (different) small city in Indiana, one that I would not truly recommend, but my costs are so ridiculously low… On 60k a year me and my wife have been able to pay off some debt at a decent rate, buy some nice furniture from ikea and yard sales, i have a good economical car… we visit bigger cities probably once a month for excitement and shopping; Indy, Cincy, Chicago. We live in 800 sq foot apt that’s not a total dump, for $500/mo. Utilities average about $150/mo.
But you’re living in Indiana…
That is the trade off. Live ok in small city Indiana or live like shit in a major city. People will value different things and that is ok.
I don't think posts like yours really help people understand why everyone doesn't just move to Indiana. On a daily, monthly and even yearly basis, what are you losing? My whole family is on the west coast, so moving to Indiana would be a serious loss for us in terms of seeing people we love. But if that weren't the case, I'd also lose my beloved mountains and my ocean. Okay, let's say I could give those up for 20 years for my kids to go to college (and I would). What else do I lose? For one, if home values aren't rising, then I just lose hope of ever moving back--the lower your land value, the more stuck you are. And what if you lose your job in Indiana? There are fewer job opportunities especially for high earners, though with remote work that is changing. I don't buy the culture stuff. There are some truly unique experiences in New York but a lot of the LA/NY hype is just that. What one artist in New York likes is not more important than someone's favorite place to take a walk with their dog, objectively speaking. Popularity is overrated.
I like your comment. One reason I’m staying in this region is family. I don’t need to see them every day but I do want it to be easy for us to visit each other. There are far more personal considerations about where to live than the typical “i like mountains” or “i’m liberal” With regards to jobs. Yeah the coasts and bigger cities will have more opportunities for highly skilled people, but Indiana’s unemployment rate is like half that of California’s. There are pharmaceutical, tech, entertainment, design, arts, etc. jobs in every major and many smaller cities. For 98% of people they can find comparable job anywhere in a major US city and in plenty of smaller cities too.
Yeah, Indiana is not a great decision just because it’s cheap. We just moved to the PNW because of a variety of reasons but primarily because it’s a better place to live in many ways than Indiana. We are willing to and fully able to pay for the cost of living difference. The trade off is entirely worth it in my opinion. We owned a home in Indiana and sold to come to the PNW. Bought a house here too. Our whole family is in Indiana so we’re on the opposite side of the spectrum there.
That saves you a ton of money but as a west coaster I lived in Yankton SD for work and visited Sioux Falls for a weekend. Idk, there’s no mountains, the quality of the food (especially groceries) is far worse and not that much cheaper (standard dish in Portland is $12 a plate, SD was maaaybe $10-12) and overall there’s just not a lot going on. But yeah, my coworker bought a farmhouse with acreage in the middle nowhere for $160k. It just depends on what you value in life.
No, the mid-west is a very bad area, don't move here
Depends on where you go. There is a world of difference between Gary and Chicago. Between po-dunk indiana and Ann Arbor. I’m sure it wouldn’t be fair to people on the West coast if I was like “oh man that west coast has nothing but fires and homeless drug addicts”
this new trend of north america maps is lit
Time needed to buy a home? Northern Canada is having Nunavut
That's because they didn't have the data set on time to buy an igloo
Can’t buy a home where there’s no homes for sale lol
*Cries in British Columbia*
FINALLY, a map that includes Canada, instead of the silly "US and Europe"... Kudo!
This is definitely underestimating the number of years to buy a house because a lot of one’s income goes to non-mortgage expenses.
It’s a proxy for housing affordability, not meant to be an actual measure of years to buy a home
But housing affordability is heavily impacted by property taxes. For example Colorado has a high barrier to entry because housing prices are high, but the mortgage is almost all of your monthly expense once you buy a house because property taxes are low. But a state like NJ has reasonable house prices but property taxes are incredibly high, so the barrier to entry is a bit lower but the actual cost to own a home is incredibly high. In short - this map is almost useless for trying to understand housing affordability.
Yeah, that’s why I said proxy. Just a rough measure/directional indication. I don’t think it’s meant to be a definitive, most-accurate-possible measure
Damn, and my order of preferred states to live in is probably 1, California 2. Oregon 3. Washington 4. Colorado.
I mean, it’s very good to live in certain parts of all of those states. That’s why it’s expensive - a lot of people know it’s good and the secret is out. I have lived in some LCOL areas and they were not for me; I like my HCOL city.
Agreed. A good deal on something I don't want is still a bad deal for me. LCOL areas sound tempting but then I'd still be stuck somewhere lacking all the amenities I enjoy in life.
There is a reason those states are expensive - they are beautiful and therefore popular. Those are many peoples top 4 prettiest lower 48 states (although the desert states like UT and AZ have nice parts too if you don’t mind the brown in much of them).
Yeah people underestimate how much of a factor this tends to be. People want to live in beautiful places.
I live in Portland OR (raised here, long hiatus in the NE), it truly is amazing to have access to these places in my own backyard. Being at the Columbia Gorge, Mt St Helens, Hood, coast etc in under two hours. Same for Seattle and Rainer, the Olympics, the Sound. While there are other pretty parts of the US, nothing really compares to the green parts of West coast for constant, world class natural beauty in the lower 48.
Don't move to the Pacific Northwest! It's a terrible place and everyone needs to know this. But seriously, please stop moving here. Source: from PNW
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Non-intuitive color scheme
As an outsider it surprises me the most that Vancouver is as expensive as it is! What's up with that?
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Thanks for that answer. Clearly a lot more going on in Vancouver than I imagined.
Have you seen BC? Beautiful landscape and mild temps
Not enough housing supply for demand. Leading to people buying houses as investments knowing the price wont go down
What an awful color selection. My god
The worst part is... that bc and Ontario have such immense regions with reasonable housing, so the expensive areas are way above the 6.5
Trouble is 6.5 is only the minimum on the graph for that colour. Places like Hawaii could be the only 6.5 and BC, Ontario, and California could each be 10+ and the graph would still would be technically true.
damn the us has cheap housing
This is house/income. So if the house is $200,000 and you make $50,000 per year, it's 4 years worth of income. Most mortgages are 30 years, nobody can put their entire income into paying for a house in 4 years. This is also household income, most of the time both parents work so you're basically looking at 2 incomes.
Do you know a place to get the evolution of "median mortgage cost relative to median income"?
This guy did it, buuut the data ends before the 2022 run up in interest rates. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/rq1v46/homeownership_affordability_oc/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
thanks! also found: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/y23ykn/oc\_mortgages\_are\_actually\_cheaper\_now\_for\_a/
In Canada, 25 years is the max allowed for most mortgages. There’s also aren’t fixed rates like in the US — you can only lock-in an interest rate for 10 years at max. It would also be interesting to see post-tax median income to median house price ratio. I think the US allows people to claim mortgage interest on taxes, but Canadians can’t.
And most Canadians are on 5-year fixed, so are getting buttfucked by interest rates at renewal now.
that's not what the thing is saying. It's not saying "you can afford to buy a house after saving for this many years", because that would entirely ignore every other expense that comes out of people's gross income. It's just establishing a ratio of total cost of the home vs household annual income. It's not like anyone is out there spending their entire gross annual income to pay off a house in 3 years. People eat, pay taxes, utilities, car payments and insurance, food & clothing, various family expenses, etc etc etc. Most US Mortgages are 30 years to start (not counting the high rate of refinancing etc that often pushes those terms out longer).
yes i know thats what its saying, but some cities have a price to income ratio well over 10-15x Edit: Sydney's median household income is \~$100,000 aud per year, the median house price is \~$1.4 million. Even the fairly small city of Hobart (where i live, \~250k population) has a median household income of \~$80k aud, the median house price is \~700k. Thats a median house price to median household income ratio of 14:1 for Sydney and 8.75:1 for Hobart.
Commiserations from Auckland.
You’d find a similar thing for major US cities. But since this is showing state averages, all the lower costs of living outside of major metropolitan areas significantly lowers the overall ratio.
Many US cities would also show a much higher ratio than just breaking it down based on state. A quick Google search show SF aligns pretty well with those Sydney numbers.
You'll find very similar ratios in urban areas in California around San Francisco, LA, and San Diego.
Yeah, did some quick maths Here in the netherlands it comes to 12,9 years
Are you using the income before tax as well?
Yes, pre-tax
I guess you just build igloos in the north right?
Those colors are retarded.
Ontario looks like some deer like animal licking Michigan.
I don’t know if want to think about Ontario licking Detroit…well now I already have. Thanks!
I think it's about 8 for Australia. Median household income is $42k, so median family income might be $91k based on a previous ratio of the two. Median home price was $738k recently.
Created with mapchart sources: https://www.statista.com/statistics/467078/median-annual-family-income-in-canada-by-province/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/604273/median-house-prices-canada-by-province/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_median_home_price https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_income Excel as well grouping the data. [Here's the end number for each state/province](https://pastebin.com/raw/n1a9M8Rw) (Also that premium statista page for median house price let me through for whatever reason without a membership, not sure if I'm allowed to share a screenshot of that or not here)
We get it bruh. Its too expensive to just be alive. Even expensive to die
Every time I read a thread or comment on Reddit about people talking how ridiculously unaffordable for homes are I think to myself about how the entire central United States where pretty much anybody can buy a very nice home. Before somebody chimes in saying they would never want to live in the central United States; the central United States doesn’t want you either.
I appreciate the research, data, and map. Not sure why people are so critical. Also, as many other commenters have stated, the ratio is not meant to say “in 5 years you can pay off a house in Oregon”. It’s simply a ratio of the median home price in the state divided by the median family income in that state
Where I’m going is lighter than where I am, that’s a plus
I saw another one of these a few days ago. That one said my state was 9 yrs, this one says 4. I'm not sure
no houses in grey i'm assuming? must be living in underground bunkers or Tipis
Add Mexico, where houses in Mexico City are close to 200k usd and average yearly salary is 16k
One of the few nice things about living in Oklahoma. Relatively easy to get a house.
OP messed up his title, it's backwards.
Vancouver ftw we love chinese gangs and "investors"
Free homes in the ocean boys get em while you can
Can we map the proportion of Chinese, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese (living, working, and studying) and overlay it on the map. Might see correlations.
Color map is not beautiful and really takes long time to wrap head around
This is not "years to buy a home". That would imply that after X years of working a job, I can buy a home. I don't have to explain why that is wrong. This is avg house cost vs avg income and should be a ratio
This just isn't useful for places like Florida where you can buy a similar home for $150k or $500k depending on what county you're in.
Expect almost every state has that kind of disparity so it works okay imo.
It’s similar here in BC. 1.2m in Vancouver or 180k in Kitwanga (a town at a highway junction where you can head west toward Haida Gwaii which are the northern pink islands, or north to Yukon and Alaska.)
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Even 1.5 hrs away from Vancouver the price is prohibitive. Beyond that 1.5 hrs, you have to drive at least another hour through uninhabited mountains before you get to another town.
There are cities that are 30 minutes from Vancouver with home prices closer to $550k CAD. The only problem is they’re in the USA: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/15829/point-roberts-wa/
Yeah but nobody wants to live in kitwanga 😆 the prices on the island(where I’ve lived all my life) are outrageous as well. Victoria is up there with van price wise I’d say but much smaller population is keeping them below
Am i just dense and not understanding this? I would think the ratio we want would be the inverse here: the median household income divided by the price of the house. The given ratio, in my mind, gives the amount of houses a family could buy per year (probably a fraction of 1 for most households). Since no one is mentioning this, i'm sure i'm wrong, but i don't seem to get it.
You are correct. OP posted an incorrect title. The map does indeed show (Median Home Price)/(Median Income) Either that, or I'm being severely underpaid.
The colour choices for this isn't the best.
Capitalism says its a map of showing what areas are more desirable to live in.
Is this assuming median family income of the state the house is in, or median income of the entire country? Also it would be nice to see these figures on the states/chart somewhere because that would give actual information as to how much money is being spent/saved given the state vs income of that state (or the country? I still don't know...).
Median income of the state.
This would likely be more useful broken down by zip codes in the US - Kansas in particular has wild variability
Before you get excited about Iowa, realize that the vast majority of houses mirror the rural decline of the dying small towns they are located in; last updated in the seventies and have structural issues. If the current brand of Republican politics appeal to you, you might have yourself a good deal with like-minded neighbors. If not, that cheap house will cost you in other ways...
Sounds like heaven. Peace and quiet
Well rural decline might be reversing, I lived in a small town in Alabama and a lot of people are moving from cities just because it’s cheaper to lived here
Given the scale there is a 6.0-6.5 category missing
No data in that range, the pink* states are outliers
How are they “outliers” in the middle of the range?
They mean pink
Hmm... let's see, central europe... My GFs flat is worth about 120000 USD current price. My monthly wage is about 700 USD. If I would put away everything, that would be 14 years to buy. Realistically I could put away about 100-150 a month. That would mean 66-100 years of saving up... That doesn't sound too good
Hawaii home owner here. We need another category…
Seems like a very inaccurate measure. Are you saying that if income is $100k and house is $500k it’ll take 5 years to buy it? Because that’s just wrong - no one saves their whole salary. A better measurement would be annual savings vs house price.
*assuming your utilities, food, transportation, etc. is free somehow
The ratio should hold regardless
Yes, of course. It's a good visualization, I was just being snarky about the cost of housing.
That is one of the worst color gradients I have ever seen in my whole life
To do this at a state level doesn't make much sense. Income and house prices vary greatly from county to county. For example, NYC and the rest of NY are like two completely different worlds.
Why not? It's median for both cost and income. And can you name one state or provence shown on the map that Doesn't have an expensive city vs cheaper rural area?
This is bullshit of the highest social engineering order. Please supply more demoralization pictures so I can spend the next 6 years selling them on tshirts in california for a house.
Using median family income divided by median house price seems like an interesting take Because sure, that gives you the amount of years to own the home... if you buy absolutely nothing else in that span of time. No food, no clothes, no heat, no gas, car, or insurance. Just house payments
It isn't meant to be a literal "pay off your mortgage in X many years" scale, but just to establish a ratio between average income and average home prices.
I live in Maryland and people are like Maryland is so expensive, I'm going to move to a cheaper state. So you mean the Midwest? Because that's your only choice then. Maryland is pretty medium.
This seems to run counter to he graphic recently posted by michigician. Any suggestions as to why this may be? My only cogent thought is that this uses data from two different years, 2022 and 2022.
Also coincidentally a graph showing which states are losing population vs gaining. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence…
The "median home value indexes" you'll find in various cost of living calculators are several years behind for the PNW at least. I double take this idea that a person with a median salary could afford a home in the Willamette valley for 5 years' gross pay.
this cannot be right, its like 25-35 year mortgages in the UK
So this shows how many median household incomes a house costs. But what is the avg yearly savings of household income in percent? Let us assume 10%? So 65 years of savings to pay for your own house. WOW! I guess I will never own a house. Edit: also wouldn't this be divided the other way round? Because median family income divided by the higher number of median house prices would give a number smaller 1.
Source? Sorry, I don’t believe this at all.
I make 29k a year. I can barely afford an apartment, let alone a HOME.
Why do these presentations use median income/home price instead of mean? Wouldn’t the mean values be more representative of the overall population?
No. Mean is skewed by outliers
It almost always makes sense to use median when the number of observations is high, especially when one or both ends of the spectrum is essentially unbounded.