At 43, Sharon Reese is a housing market refugee — forced to return to her Ohio hometown after 18 years in Las Vegas, despite a successful career training dancers for nightclub acts.
“If you don’t have between $600,000 and $800,000, you’re not buying a house out there,” Reese said. “Las Vegas has a lot of opportunity, and it was affordable in 2006, but it’s become unaffordable. We quit our jobs and moved across the country. We’re hoping this is the right decision for us.”
Reese and her family are unpacking at her parents’ Youngstown home, a temporary stop until she and her husband, who was a casino worker in Las Vegas, can find jobs and a house of their own with their young daughter. Youngstown is one of the last two metro areas in the country where a household with nearly any income should be able to find a single-family home they can afford to buy, according to an analysis of April data by the National Association of Realtors.
Before the pandemic, there were 20 states that were considered affordable as a whole under the group’s definition, including the presidential election swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. As of this year, there is none. Even the states with the closest match between income and home prices — Iowa, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan — didn’t make the cut.
Since the pandemic, two states, Montana and Idaho, have surpassed California as the most unaffordable states for local homebuyers, according to the analysis. Hawaii and Oregon round out the list of the five least affordable states.
The Realtors’ analysis assigns affordability scores to states and large metro areas on a scale of 0 to 2. A score of 0 means that no household can afford any home on the market.
A score of 1 means that homes on the market are affordable to households in proportion to their position on the income ladder — in other words, 100% of families can afford at least some homes on the market. And a score of 2 would mean that all households can afford all homes on the market, but no state or metropolitan area even reached a 1.
The least affordable metro area was Los Angeles, which scored only 0.3, while the metro areas of Youngstown (0.97) and Akron (0.95) in Ohio were rated most affordable.
According to the latest estimates from July by real estate company Redfin, median single-family home sale prices were $175,000 in Youngstown and $239,500 in Akron. That compared with $487,000 in Las Vegas, $490,000 in Boise and $1 million in the Los Angeles area.
The Las Vegas area, where the Reese family had lived for 18 years, had a score of 0.5 on the Realtors’ scale. No state earned an overall score of 1, though Iowa, West Virginia and Ohio came close, at nearly 0.9. The least affordable states, Montana, Idaho, California, Hawaii and Oregon, all had scores around 0.4.
Nationwide, home affordability …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
