The Affordability of America

Something is wrong with American housing.

The median home now costs more than five times the median household income nationally — a ratio that would have been considered a crisis just a generation ago. But that national number hides enormous variation. There are counties where homes cost less than twice annual income, and counties where the ratio exceeds twenty.

The map below lets you explore this directly. Each county is colored by its price-to-income ratio — green for affordable, red for unaffordable. Hover over any county to see the full income distribution alongside median home values.

A few things stand out.

The coasts are expensive, but not uniformly. California’s coastal counties are severely unaffordable, but parts of the Central Valley look reasonable by comparison. The same pattern holds in the Northeast — Manhattan is extreme, but rural upstate New York is not.

The South and Midwest remain relatively affordable. Most of the deep South, the Great Plains, and the industrial Midwest still show price-to-income ratios below five — the traditional threshold for “unaffordable” housing.

Some of the most unaffordable places aren’t where you’d expect. Mountain resort counties — Pitkin County (Aspen), Summit County (Breckenridge), Teton County (Jackson Hole) — often show ratios above fifteen. These are driven by amenity demand rather than job markets.

The data is from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2022 five-year estimates, which gives the most statistically reliable county-level figures available.