A Tale of Two Housing Markets
Why is buying a house so expensive on the West Coast and so cheap almost everywhere else?
In Indianapolis, $167,000 can buy you, outright, a four-bedroom, three-bathroom home with a basketball hoop out front and a lawn in the back. That same amount wouldn’t even cover the down payment on a four-bedroom, three-bath house in San Jose, California, where the median price of a home hovers above $1 million. The difference is staggering but not surprising. There really are two different housing markets in the United States: one that serves California and a smattering of other highly coveted cities, and one for the rest of the nation.
A new report by real estate analytics firm Zillow makes that fact painfully obvious, offering a snapshot of the most- and least-affordable home-buying markets in the 35 largest metropolitan regions in United States. (Because of the multiple definitions used in different sources, I’m using “city” and “metropolitan area” as synonyms, even though they aren’t the same.)
Here’s the full list for the 35 largest metropolitan regions in the country:
