The median existing home in April is affordable if you make at least $77,577.
Unfortunately, only about 13% of individual wage earners make that much, which means two incomes are generally required to buy it and keep it. Long gone are the days when one income can support a wife raising children in the home.
The price for the median existing home has climbed to $201,700 in April, and the homeownership rate as of the beginning of the year has fallen to a level first achieved in the early 1970s.
At $154,600 in January 2012, the lowest median existing home price since the late housing bubble, the then median existing home was affordable if you made at least $59,461, which was the case for 20% of individual wage earners at the time. The homeownership rate then was 65.4.
So in just two short years the percentage of wage earners for whom housing is affordable has contracted by a whopping 35% as prices have rebounded in excess of 30% under the influence of Federal Reserve interest rate policy.
The birth rate in 2012 at 12.6 per 1000 women is half what it was in 1955 and the lowest yet in the post-war.
