The number of US cities where first-time homebuyers are faced with at least a $1 million price tag on the average entry-level home has nearly tripled in the past five years, according to new research.
A Thursday report from Zillow indicates that a typical starter home is now worth $1 million or more in 237 cities, up from 84 cities in 2019, underscoring America’s ongoing home affordability crisis.
“Affordability has been strained across the board,” Orphe Divounguy, a senior economist at Zillow, said. “We see the largest number of million-dollar starter homes in expensive coastal markets. We see them in markets with very low homeownership rates and we see them in markets with more building regulations.”
I’m wondering about that too.
In my area, i was above starter home (because of updates) on a 2 bedroom, 1 bath house built in 1946, on a fraction of an acre. But we have an older stock of houses. Where my brothers live, those are not even choices. Those towns really didn’t exist at that time, so most of the houses are much newer, much bigger, on much bigger lots