Only 1.6% of San Diego homes are affordable for the typical household, according to a Bankrate analysis.
Why it matters: Prospective homeowners earning a median income are priced out of the local real estate market, making it one of the hardest major cities to buy a home.
Zoom in: Buyers need to make $221,900 to afford a typical home in the San Diego area, per the analysis.
The big picture: Over 75% of U.S. homes on the market are unaffordable to the typical household, Bankrate found.
- Persistently high home prices and mortgage rates are only part of the squeeze. In many places, there aren't enough homes available.
Between the lines: Researchers considered homes affordable if annual housing costs (including insurance and property taxes) were below 30% of a household's gross income.
- In San Diego County, homes affordable to households earning the median income of $103,000 a year are worth $347k or less with a $2,577 max monthly payment.
State of play: In only 11 of the 34 largest U.S. metros do at least 30% of listings fall within reach of middle-income households.
- In ultra-pricey Miami, Los Angeles and San Diego, fewer than 1 in 50 homes for sale were attainable to the typical household, as of July.
- Regional affordability gaps largely come down to construction.
What we're watching: Builders and San Diego policymakers are leaning into townhomes as a more attainable option for first-time buyers.
- Townhomes lately made up 18% of single-family homebuilding — nearly double their share from a decade ago, said Robert Dietz, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders, at a December event.
The bottom line: "Without a meaningful increase in housing supply, particularly in places where people want to live and work, affordability is unlikely to improve even if mortgage rates ease," Bankrate data analyst Alex Gailey tells Axios.
