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“The saintly California cities of San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego are particularly difficult areas for heroes to aspire to homeownership, as is Los Angeles and, to the north, Seattle,” the study said.
In central San Francisco, only 1% of the homes for sale are affordable to police officers who are in the early years of their career and none are affordable to younger teachers.
“The cities of Boston and Chicago also have poor opportunities for workforce hero homeownership,” according to the NAHB report. The suburbs of those cities, along with the suburbs of Memphis, New York, Dallas and Milwaukee are also tough going for public employees and others who would like to live in the communities they serve.
David Crowe, NAHB’s senior staff vice president for federal regulatory and housing policy, indicated that it was difficult to draw generalities about where housing affordability woes are most acute for workforce heroes. “It’s all over the map. It’s East Coast, it’s West Coast,” he said, and the size of the metropolitan area, its growth rate and the age of the housing stock didn’t show much correlation with affordability measures.
But the level of affordability for the workers did appear to be weakly related to the rate of overall homeownership in the areas studied, Crowe said.
The NAHB study follows a National Housing Conference (NHC) investigation of housing affordability for particular occupations in the nation’s 60 largest metropolitan areas in 1999 and updated with data from 2001. A second edition of the report, “Paycheck to Paycheck: Wages and the Cost of Housing in America,” was released last month.
Where NHC analysis looked only at the median prices of homes sold, the NAHB study was able to consider the entire price distribution of homes sold, Crowe said. Also, more complete information on incomes was included.
NAHB’s research also compared the home buying ability of nurses, teachers, fire fighters and police with other households in the area.
Police officers, for example, find homeownership particularly difficult relative to other households in San Antonio, Phoenix, Columbus and Jacksonville. In those cities, the percentage of homes that police officers can afford is more than 25 percentage points lower than the homes affordable to the median-income household.
Summing up the various comparisons that were made, the report concluded that homeownership is least affordable for workforce heroes in the metropolitan areas of Dallas, Seattle and Washington, D.C.
That was followed closely by Milwaukee, New York, San Francisco and San Jose.
Relatively better homeownership opportunities can be found in the metro areas of San Antonio and Cleveland, followed closely by Detroit and New Orleans.
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