BlazeSalary Needed To Buy a Home In The US
ByeI want to see Honolulu
radixThis is beautiful! Does anyone know the software used to create this?
Interesting that Pittsburgh has a lower median house price than Detroit.
Have you seen Detroit? A third of homes downtown is completely derelict.
Hey, that's called a fixer-upper!
That’s honestly what’s been happening. When we were shopping around there, I’d been seeing neighborhoods being fixed up one by one by contractors, because you’ve been able to buy places for literally $1k, and have been selling for $250k. It’s pretty wild to see, especially when some of these neighborhoods get completely gentrified and suddenly all the houses jump up another $100k. You’ll see a neighborhood of houses that might have a couple sales for $20-50k, and then 1-2 of the renovated ones selling for ~$200k, and literally on the other side of the road those exact same homes are going for $300-400k.
Maybe all those open toilets in the basement are not as appealing as Pittsburghers think they are…
lmao cries in San Jose
I mean, the thing is, it's not even that great a city. Like, sure the tech jobs are here, and the bay area overall is nice and has temperate weather, but San Jose itself is a giant sprawling suburb. Downtown is "okay" and we do have public transit in the form of the light rail but it's pretty slow.
I'm paying $3.4k to rent a 2x2.5 townhome with my partner currently. It's very nice, and my landlords are just a very nice couple rather than a company, but dang is it expensive just to live here.
And before anyone asks, I live here 1) because I work in tech and the jobs are here, and 2) because my family all lives in the Bay Area and they're very important to me.
Anyway, my formal recommendation to any of you looking to move to San Jose is to basically not do that. Find a remote job and work in tech that way, or hybrid so you can live further out and commute only a couple times a week.
I work in tech as well and can still barely afford most of the rent prices I see here. It’s horrible.
I saved for a few years, and every amount I saved was offset by the housing prices going up. I eventually had $300K saved up and couldn’t afford the down payment on a family home.
That’s just completely and utterly unsustainable. I live in San Diego County now, which isn’t a whole lot better.
My family was renting a house is S.D for more than a decade. They got booted when the son-in-law of the owner stuck her in a retirement home and needed to pay for it with the house. (Speculation from what we were told, and put together)
It was a shitty, shitty, home. Carpets were gross and floor underneath likely needs to be redone. Kitchen is from the 50’s or 60’s but with 90’s appliances. It had a bad linoleum floor, with completely out of date cabinets and faux bricks that had been painted over a bunch of times. Place likely needed new plumbing and definitely new electrical. The roof needed work; there was likely mold in the bathroom including places in the wall that were squishy. The yard was small and filled in with broken bits of concrete mixed with clay.
It was sold for more than $750,000
I like San Jose - it’s a cozy-sized city with all the arts. I just could never scrape together enough money for a house.
They should include the interest rate they are using to calculate the mortgage. Based on what’s provided they are assuming around a 6% mortgage which is no longer available. Tack an extra $1,000 monthly payment onto that million dollar home and an extra $40,000 to your income to make it affordable. (Assuming debt/income ratio and income taxes)
Did I miss anything?
They did it’s at the bottom. 6.37%
Which, having literally just bought a home, is a supremely optimistic rate to get right now. We spent $10k buying down our interest and only managed 6.9%
What is the size of the “median” home? Single family, or townhome, or condo? Given that this appears to be a flat average, this graphic does not account for the extremely wide variance depending on the cases above. A two bedroom condo and a five bedroom single family home could easily have a $2000/mo variance in the mortgage cost.
The other item that would perhaps be useful would be to call out what the down payment requirement is for each of these areas; ie, you can only achieve a $3000/mo mortgage if you’ve also put down $140,000, which is unachievable for over 90% of the country.
NeatoYep. You're not getting any kind of stand-alone home in D.C. for $139k salary unless it's a huge piece of crap.
There is no way that this graphic isn’t including the entire metro area. The city I currently live in is on the list and so is the city that I am planning to relocate to. Prices shown do not accurately reflect the prices of houses/condos that I would consider “in the city”.
From the Bay Area, $1.5M will get you a two bed one bath or three bed 1.5 bath home built in 1925 or so. You can buy in a lower end neighborhood for a little less or a higher end one for a bit more, but the standard is going to be a craftsman home from 1906 with a driveway if you’re lucky.
I think the graphic also used a 20% down payment and a slightly over 6% mortgage in the calculation.
I just want to retire and move someplace cheap, like NYC or London.
Wow, two bedrooms for only $1.5mil! What a steal!
KingJalopy That’s insane to me. I live in Tulsa, OK and bought a nice 2400sq ft home with 4 bedrooms, 2 living rooms, dining room, 2 full baths and garage for 120k. But the downside is I’m living in Oklahoma…so… Yeah.
I feel that. I got a cute little almost 4 bed, 1.5 bath farm house in a smallish town in Wisconsin for 120k a couple of years ago. When I first moved here I was a shut in and the trade-off of not really having stuff to do out of the house was fine, but now I’m wanting to go enjoy the nightlife, have a good meal that isn’t a bar burger (I can get some damn good bar burgers, but still) and also drive less so we’re looking at moving to a bigger city in the nearish future.
On the upside thanks to the hyperinflation we’ve been able to get a chunk of equity that’ll help us a lot when we do move
Well the good thing about Tulsa is it’s still a fairly large city and there’s tons of shit to do here. Tons of great restaurants and great nightlife. And as far as Oklahoma goes, it’s extremely liberal here in the city. Which is crazy because historically not so much lol. This is home of the biggest race riot ever in the country. It’s not the best place in the world but it’s extremely cheap to live here and has everything I had when I lived in Dallas. Minus all the traffic lol.
Where in the Bay? Here in the Tri-Valley, you can get a 3-4 for 1.5-.8 mil.
Even in downtown San Jose you’re talking about seven figures for an ancient craftsman with outdated electric and plumbing. Willow Glen, Los Gatos, Cupertino, you’re pushing $2M.
If you’re willing to commute from way up in the east bay, you can do a bit better, you’re right, but if you’re commuting to a South Bay company you’re paying for it in travel time and stress.
And tbh, I was stationed for a bit near Dublin. I can’t swear to what the prices are like now, but man, now that I’m out of that line of work I’d choose to live in East SJ or the peninsula instead.
But those are super reasonable prices, I will happily admit, and if you work in SF the commute might be worth it. We just need much more mass transit.
What the fuck America is so Goddamned cheap.
Interesting, where are you living?
Compare the median salaries in those places to chart, doesnt seem very cheap to me.
I live in phoenix.
Less than 7% of people make enough to buy a home per this chart.
Huh? A typical salary here couldn’t afford any of these. 0.
We’ve literally made our society completely dependent on marriage/dual income. For those of us that are perpetually single and don’t have a WFH tech job that could go anywhere, homeownership is as obtainable as a unicorn.
That’s not home price, that’s salary requirements.a house in San Jose costs $1.6 million, not $375 thousand. You’re paying about $9 thousand a month before taxes.
Just making sure you know the prices listed aren’t home prices, it’s the buyer’s necessary minimum annual salary to purchase the house. Unless you’re Australian, in which case America is actually cheap by comparison
Kaputnik [he/him]Also cheap compared to Canada, especially around the great lakes region. Across the lake in Canada is one of the most unaffordable places to live in the country, along with the southwest coast
CMGX78I kinda wanna move to Buffalo now.
ivanafterall
Semi-Hemi-DemigodHope you like snow. At least for the next decade or so
Don’t worry, there’s a reason for its price
They should have also included some rural areas’ home buying prices for perspective against the absurd cost of living in a large city.
Here’s my data to add to the list: bought my house last decade in a rural area, while I was making about $45000 annually, mortgage cost per month is literally off the chart at under $800/mo.
ubermeistersWhy? This is a overview of populated areas, since that’s the most… populous. It’s an indicator for people who live in urban areas.
It would be more appropriate to have a second dataset for non-urban areas. imho.
Because the title of the post is “Salary Needed To Buy a Home In The US”
“The US” is a very large country with more rural area than large cities, and there is opportunity for a much lower cost of living out there that people should know about.
Why? Almost no one lives in the rural areas. (Oh look, it’s another electoral college joke.)
Roughly 80% of the population in the US live in urban areas. This graphic is already definitely taking the entire metro area into account, which can include fairly rural areas depending on the city.
People are very aware that rural areas are significantly cheaper. They are cheaper precisely because the demand is low. People either do not want to live there, or they cannot live there given the industry that they work in.
You also need to realize that with a more expensive metro area comes higher median wages, so you’re not necessarily even coming out on top living in a rural area.
Regardless of any of the above assumptions, the title of the post makes what I said relevant and accurate. Refer to the title of the post.
It’s simply not true that good jobs are not available outside of the big cities. How do you think rural people survive? On my road, in a town of far less than 10k residents, there are easily 20-30 houses that are nice as fuck, big brick houses with large yards and well maintained everything. Those people have serious money. Places like that can be found all over the place if you drive through rural America. Likewise you can find shantytowns of poor people in rural areas and cities.
Basically if you have marketable skills, there are jobs all over the place. Taking your skills to where your money goes farther makes life a lot easier. I’m making more than double the amount of money I need to support my family at the moment.
Refer to the title of the info-graphic. Salary required to buy a home in the 50 largest cities in the US.
Obviously people with money exist in rural areas. I never claimed that there were no good jobs. I said if your industry does not exist outside of large cities then you are basically forced to live and work there. Take for example a hardware engineer for a tech company. They absolutely have marketable skills, but the work cannot be done remote thus without changing industries how are they supposed to move to a rural area?
If you have those same marketable skills you can make a ton of money in large cities. Senior software engineers can realistically make $300K or more in nyc. If they go into fintech then they can make absolutely absurd amounts of money. Even in traditionally wealthy neighborhoods like the uws or ues the median household income is $130k. They are not hurting for cash or sacrificing any sort of lifestyle to be there.
Sure but if you live in the city, you have to deal with all the city bullshit, and that’s not worth the potentially higher pay and vastly higher cost of living. I would never live in an apartment again personally unless my financial situation went to shit and that’s all I could afford. City traffic is total ass garbage to deal with, and the crowding of people everywhere, having to wait to get through crowded lines for stuff, the stench of dumpsters in the summer… all that stuff that I never have to deal with here is the value I prefer.
You and I have vastly different experiences of cities. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in a town of 5,000 and I would never even consider moving back to a rural area, or even a suburb. I own a house in a city that is on the list above, but I’d prefer to have an apartment in nyc. As for traffic, live in the right place and you don’t have to drive. I’ve been car free for years. I recognize that is not an option in a lot of US cities, but it should be. I also don’t really have any issue with crowds, or trash.
I’m not saying that cities are better for everyone, but a lot of people genuinely prefer them.
Sounds like someone needs a population density map as a reminder of where most of us live…
No I don’t, I already know that most people live in big cities. It’s super obvious to everyone with a tiny bit of education or awareness.
You seem to have missed the point that I’m letting you know about the options that are out there. People assume that it costs $3000 a month to own a house, and it definitely does not. There are houses all over rural America for $100k ballpark price.
Cool I’ll work at the corner store i guess, since there’s no work there
People in rural areas usually commute to work to a larger town. When I was doing that it took me about 30 minutes to commute to work.
I gradually leveled up my career and now I work remote in my home office, and it’s the best possible scenario with my good pay and low cost of living.
I agree there should be a second dataset, but rural areas have their own issues that people might not want to deal with. Like a lack of entertainment and other services.
That all depends on the kind of entertainment and services you want. If you want nightclubs and prostitutes, you need to go to a big city.
If you want freedom, clean air, nature, and the ability to own a home then you need to get out of the big city. For most general goods and services, you can order it online if you don’t have it available. That’s the same everywhere though.
Guess I should move away from Seattle then
Seattle priced me out around 2014. I don’t know how anyone affords it without a roommate or a six figure job.
No idea. I get legit panic attacks everything I look at rental prices and I need to move asap. Nothing under $2k/mo. seems to even be worth looking at. Or it’s a scam
It would be much more useful to see a comparison to income so you could get a better idea of how realistic purchasing a home actually is. For example, Buffalo has cheap homes, but can you get a job there that afford one? And how is the quality of life there? How is crime? Like, it might be the case that San Jose is a better deal or more realistic if salaries are high enough to justify the home price. Because right now, this is more a map of just, what is the overall economy like for each city.
TalaraineWait till they find out it's likely harder to rent in many areas thanks to the new ratio requirement.
I saw a house in Phoenix that was in my price range. I thought, “Wow, this house has a lot of natural light.”
The last photo was a picture of the roof, or lack thereof.
“Price includes 4 walls. Roof is extra.”
*Roof is included with the Bronze subscription Plan at an extra $450 a month.
Tfw all you can afford is the rust belt