Young Californians being shut out of housing market
If you’re having a hard time scraping money together to buy a house, you might take solace in the fact that you’ve got a lot of company. Or, perhaps not.…
By Darrell Satzman • • 1 min readAs it stands, two-thirds of the single-family homes and condos in the state are priced higher than a typical family can afford, according to a new report from the California Association of Realtors.
The median household income in the state is about $60,000, by the way.
Meanwhile, housing costs are rising much faster than salaries. CAR chief economist Leslie Appleton-Young tells the Daily News that many markets in the state have returned to their pre-recession highs.
“I think that the big risk is with millennials in California. Where are they going to live,” Appleton-Young said. “They are some that have parents that can help them with the down payment. They are the lucky ones. But the others are on their own.”
Not surprising then the young Californians see the cost of housing as one of the biggest impediments to the American Dream.
Los Angeles County is one of the least affordable markets in the state. The median income in L.A. is less than $51,000. With that income, a family could afford a house that costs $275,000. Unfortunately, the median home price in L.A. County is $436,000. The latest affordability index shows just 32 percent of Angelenos can pay that.
The least affordable county in the state is San Francisco, where the median price of a home has soared to $1.2 million.
And good luck if you hope to save for a down payment by renting. California is the most expensive state in the country to rent. The average cost of a rental unit here rose at twice the national rate last year.