TL;DR: Americans now need to make $120K a year to afford a typical middle-class life and qualify to purchase a home. Minimum.
TL;DR: Americans now need to make $120K a year to afford a typical middle-class life and qualify to purchase a home. Minimum.
Note that the source of this opinion piece is TikTok. The salary needed for a middle class existence varies wildly from city to city.
The source is an Orlando area Realtor who happens to have a TikTok.
A local realtor doesn’t have the qualifications to make broad claims about income or affordability for the entire nation.
I’m in Salt Lake City, for example, and a recent article has the necessary salary to afford a home around $140,000/year. I moved here in part because it was a much cheaper alternative to D.C. and the minimum salary to own a home is still $140,000.
There are some pockets of affordability out there.
The map in this article is nice (though you have to scroll through some annoying stuff to get there):
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/06/homes/housing-market-prices-affordability-dg/
I would guess those would be the areas of next major population influx as people continue to flee high cost of living in other areas. Climate change making much of the west and southeast more unattractive in the long run too. While the more affordable areas are still relatively cheap compared to the rest of the country, most of them have already been seeing large spikes in housing prices too. We need some major policy changes to encourage cheap and higher density housing, better use of land in general, can’t just keep building only single family homes in low density areas sprawling out forever.