It’s expensive here, too.
The eye-popping unaffordability of housing in older, compact cities like San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. has been a popular topic of discussion in recent years.
But for buyers, things aren't much better in sprawling Sun Belt cities.
Last week we provided rankings of the most and least affordable Sun Belt cities, based on newly released data from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. It measured specifically what percent of each city faced a substantial financial burden from the cost of housing.
Here’s a look at the annual salary needed to afford the monthly payment of a median-priced home of the ten largest Sun Belt cities.
The figures come from mortgage-information provider HSH.com, which uses its mortgage information to determine the average interest rate on 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage in each market. It assumes a buyer would put 20 percent down and measures the salary needed to afford that monthly payment – including principal, insurance, taxes and interest – for the median sales price of homes sold during the third quarter of 2015, based on information from the National Association of Realtors.