The median sales price of an existing home in May rose to $213,400 from $201,500 in April.
In May you needed to make $82,077 for that home to be affordable to you.
In April you needed $77,500.
Housing affordability is generally calculated by multiplying your salary by 2.6.
Just 10.5% of individual wage earners made $80,000 or more per year in 2012, which means the vast majority of Americans must settle for homes which are priced in the bottom half of the market. Two people each making the median wage in 2012 of $27,519.10 could afford a home priced at no more than $143,100, which was the typical price of a suburban home in the collar communities of Chicago in . . . 1993, over twenty years ago.
"And it is a device of tyranny to make the subjects poor, so that a guard may not be kept, and also that the people being busy with their daily affairs may not have leisure to plot against their ruler. Instances of this are the pyramids in Egypt and the votive offerings of the Cypselids, and the building of the temple of Olympian Zeus by the Pisistratidae and of the temples at Samos, works of Polycrates (for all these undertakings produce the same effect, constant occupation and poverty among the subject people); and the levying of taxes, as at Syracuse (for in the reign of Dionysius the result of taxation used to be that in five years men had contributed the whole of their substance)." -- Aristotle, Politics, 5, 1313b.
