{"id":181,"date":"2025-12-15T17:11:43","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T17:11:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/innovationscdc.org\/blog\/?p=181"},"modified":"2025-12-15T17:11:43","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T17:11:43","slug":"more-than-75-of-homes-across-the-u-s-are-unaffordable-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/innovationscdc.org\/blog\/2025\/12\/15\/more-than-75-of-homes-across-the-u-s-are-unaffordable-study-finds\/","title":{"rendered":"More than 75% of homes across the U.S. are unaffordable, study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

CBS NEWS <\/strong>https:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/<\/a> : <\/strong>MoneyWatch<\/a>: By\u00a0Megan Cerullo<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Updated on: December 10, 2025 \/ 7:51 AM EST\u00a0\/ CBS News<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Homeownership is increasingly out of reach for most U.S. families as the gap between people’s earnings and home prices<\/a> widens, according to a new analysis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than 75% of homes across the country are unaffordable for the typical household, Bankrate said in a report<\/a>. The personal finance firm defines a home as affordable if the annual housing costs do not exceed 30% of a household’s income. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Only a sliver of the housing market is affordable to the typical household,” Bankrate data analyst Alex Gailey told CBS News. “That’s when homeownership starts to feel less like a common middle-class milestone and more like a luxury.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Experts emphasize that the ability to buy a home, long viewed as a pillar of the American Dream, is critical for building wealth. But high home prices, driven in part by a nationwide shortage of affordable housing, have made that difficult for many Americans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s left the average American household with far fewer homes than they can afford, and we haven’t been building at the rate we should be,” Gailey said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Figures from the National Association of Realtors show that only 24% of housing sales last year were by first-time homebuyers<\/a> \u2014 down from 50% in 2010. The U.S. needs 4.7 million housing units to keep up with demand, according to a July analysis from Zillow<\/a>, an online real estate marketplace. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2024 (the latest date for which figures are available), the median household income in the U.S. after adjusting for inflation was nearly $84,000, according to Census data<\/a>. That is far less than the $113,000 in annual income needed to buy a typical home, which now costs around $435,000, according to Bankrate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the country’s priciest cities, such as New York, San Francisco and Seattle, households must earn at least $200,000 a year to afford the median-priced home. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As of 2025, about 65% of U.S. households owned their own home, down from a peak of more than 69% in 2004, according to data<\/a> from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CBS NEWS https:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/ : MoneyWatch: By\u00a0Megan Cerullo Updated on: December 10, 2025 \/ 7:51 AM EST\u00a0\/ CBS News Homeownership is increasingly out of reach for most U.S. families as the gap between people’s earnings and home prices widens, according to a new analysis.  More than 75% of homes across the country are unaffordable for the typical household, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationscdc.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationscdc.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationscdc.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationscdc.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationscdc.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/innovationscdc.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183,"href":"https:\/\/innovationscdc.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions\/183"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationscdc.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationscdc.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationscdc.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationscdc.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}