How Much Income You Need to Afford the Average Home in Every State in 2018
Source: How Much
Yesterday, I discussed how much retail has changed. In particular, I noted how decades of wage stagnation made middle income consumers (and below) especially price sensitive. The results of this:
“To me, price sensitivity is not a cause, but an effect, a response to decades of wage stagnation. Wal-Mart in the 1980s and 1990s, and Amazon in the 2000s and beyond were merely the smartest players at capitalizing on that opportunity. Placing the blame on capitalist retailers gets the causation exactly backward. They responded to market forces they did little or nothing to create.”
This chart above looks at the related issue cost of housing relative to median income. Its imperfect — some very wealthy areas in NYC, DC, SF, etc. will skew the results upwards.
But the bottom line is simply buying a decent house requires a lot of money — much more than the median income in most places . . .
