Resource of the Week
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor
If you had to buy a house right now, in the community where you live, could you afford it on your salary? If so, you're more fortunate than a lot of people. Many of us work for government entities with modest pay scales -- and we can identify with the teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public employees who are being priced out of the housing market. And we're probably doing better than most of those who work in...say, retail or the hospitality industry. For an up-close look at the ugly reality, explore this week's informative resource.
Housing Affordability--Database
Source: Center for Housing Policy Paycheck to Paycheck: 2005 Findings
"In this revised and updated version of its online, interactive database Paycheck to Paycheck, the Center for Housing Policy presents wage information for more than 60 occupations and home prices and rents for nearly 200 metropolitan areas. Paycheck to Paycheck utilizes consistent measures of wages and housing costs so you can:
* See how workers in your metropolitan area are faring in the housing market;
* View the big picture for housing affordability for working families in various occupations across the country; and
* Use these analyses as a template to examine wages and housing costs in neighborhoods in your community."
You can browse the data here in several ways. For example, choose one of 183 metropolitan areas from a dropdown menu, and then click "View 5 Pre-Selected Occupations," and you'll generate a bar graph showing the income needed to purchase a median price home in that metro area, along with the average salaries of the five occupations. The 2005 median price for a home is shown above the graph.
Alternately, you can specify which occupation or occupations you wish to appear on the bar graph (maximum of five) by using checkboxes on a form that also provides a dropdown menu where you can choose to look at figures for the homeownership market, the rental market, or both.
Or, if you wish, you can start with a dropdown menu that lets you choose one of occupations and then select metropolitan areas using check boxes, comparable to the options described in the last paragraph. For example, choose "librarian" from the dropdown menu, select five metropolitan areas and see if you can afford a house in any of them. Good luck. Clicking on a "Print this chart" link in the upper right portion of the screen will display a printable version for you.
According to a press release, "The median price of a home in the U.S. rose 20 percent in just a year and a half, while at the same time wages for key community workers remained weak, even stagnant...." This probably is not a shock to you. If you're interested, you can also browse the data for 2003.
About the information in this database:
+ "Wage information is as of February 2005 and was provided by salary.com, a private provider of salary information, which maintains a database of salaries by geographic location."
+ "A rental unit is considered affordable if rent does not exceed 30 percent of income."
+ "Conventional mortgage underwriting guidelines require that not more than 28 percent of household income should be used to pay the mortgage, property taxes and insurance. A downpayment of 10 percent is assumed."
+ "Data on the median-priced home are from the National Association of Home Builders' Housing Opportunity Index for the first quarter of 2005."
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