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Brooklyn Most Unaffordable Place to Buy Home in U.S.

Brooklyn has just claimed the title of least affordable housing market in America, beating out both San Francisco and Manhattan in a newly-released report. According to the study, a Brooklyner making a median income would need to set aside 98 percent of their salary to pay for a median-priced home.

From the Gothamist:

Pack your bags for Staten Island; Brooklyn is now the worst place in America for home affordability, according to a new report by housing data group RealtyTrac. Second place is San Francisco, followed by Manhattan.

RealtyTrac studied 475 county’s housing prices in October in an attempt to spot upcoming housing bubbles, comparing the figures from the 2005-2008 bubble. The good news is there’s not an impending nationwide housing crash! The bad news? Affordability is down, with one in five housing markets exceeding their “historical affordability norms.”

They calculate affordability by finding what percent of a median income a resident would need to spend on a mortgage each month. Worst of them all is Kings County, New York, where a Brooklyner making a median income would need to set aside 98 percent of their salary to pay for a median-priced home of $615,000. But you can make do on 2% right? Food is too fattening anyway.

Also alarming is that the 98 percent is up from 95 percent, which has been the affordability level since 2000. Keeping five percent ain’t much better than two, but RealtyTrac Vice President Daren Blomquist says the buyer’s market is now driven by people who aren’t concerned with income at all.

“Incomes have not grown nearly as fast as home prices,” Blomquist tells Bloomberg News. “That disconnected home-price growth has been driven by investors and other cash buyers who aren’t as constrained by income.”

Click here to continue reading at The Gothamist.

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8 Comments

  • non-gender

    The 98 percent is not bad–it is the taxes that will do you in. It is possible in New York to allocate at least sixty percent of your income to taxes at all levels and DeBlasio wants to raise taxes even more for those who live in the city

  • City wants new migration - rich

    Only rich people can afford to buy , to rent etc ….. City wants all poor out of the city , less poor – more money in the city ….

  • Poor

    Well it’s ok if you are really poor or lying that you are too. It’s those in the middle- and it’s a wide range of middle who are having a problem…

  • How the problem began

    The problem started when the middle class Jews, Itlians and Irish ran like hell from Brooklyn when there was an AA migration from the south from the 1950’s to the 1970’s.

    Properties in places like BedSty and CH dropped to pennies (Brownsville, once majority Jewish is still pennies) and even had the city begging people to take over run-down buildings.

    People must have forgotten that the popularity of Brooklyn for two centuries has been the fact that it is in extremely close proximity to Manhattan, the money capital of the world. Running away was a foolish, knee-jerk reaction to fear.

    A new generation of young professional [hipsters](“yuppies”), looking to earn good money in Manhattan but pay less rent, and armed with loads of cash and virtually no expenses, have settled for Brooklyn. Brooklyn has now become a cultural landmark all its own, and is attracting more and more affluent people from all over the world.

    This may sound harsh, but as a Lubavitcher, we have a Rebbe who begged and encouraged us to buy homes in Crown Heights when they were DIRT cheap. Some listened, MANY did not. Well, now you are paying the price (literally) for it.