Just How Unaffordable Is US Housing These Days?: Aaron Brown

You hear a lot these days how unaffordable housing has become in the US. One way to think about affordability is to look at home prices relative to household incomes. The common rule of thumb in the 20th century was that you should pay around three years of pre-tax income for a home. On that basis, housing has been unaffordable for the last 45 years when comparing median house prices to median household income!

The trouble with this analysis is that households are all lumped into the same group, whether they own a home or rent. The reality is ...