In nearly half of metro areas, buyers must make more than $100,000 to afford a median-priced home, a Harvard University report finds. And home prices this year reached a new all-time high.

Millions of Americans are already shut out of buying a home, and the cost of buying one continues to rise.

In past decades, it was common to find a house that cost roughly three times a buyer’s annual income. But that ratio has skewed sharply since the COVID-19 pandemic, with home prices up a whopping 47% since early 2020. Median home sales prices last year were about five times the median household income, according to tabulations in a newly released report by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, and there are signs it could get worse.

The double whammy of high prices and high mortgage rates has “left homeownership out of reach to all but the most advantaged households,” says Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at the center.

  • Refurbished Refurbisher
    10•6 days ago

    Absolutely. The only way to fix this issue once and for all is to decommodify basic human needs (housing, food, water, utilities, healthcare) and have a guaranteed necessities government program.

    When basic human needs are treated as commodities, it is inevitable that people will be priced out of survival in order for a wealthy group of people to make more short term profits.