Being able to afford owning a home in New York City takes a yearly salary of about $90,000, according to a new report. Compare that to Cleveland, where prospective homeowners need only make $29,788.67, or beautiful Pittsburg, which requires $30,177.78. NYC didn’t even top the list. That honor goes to (surprise!) San Francisco, where affordably owning a home takes about $137,129.55 yearly.
The mortgage website HSH, which published the study, explains its methodology thusly:
For the results presented on these pages, and incorporating the information discussed below, HSH.com calculated the income required to cover the mortgage’s principal, interest, tax and insurance payment. We used standard 28 percent “front-end” debt ratios and a 20 percent down payment subtracted from the median-home-price data to arrive at our figures. Loans with less than a 20 percent down payment will incur mortgage insurance which would in turn increase the required salary figure.
We utilized the NAR’s 2014 first-quarter data for median home prices as well as our 2014 first-quarter average interest rate for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages to determine how much money homebuyers in 27 major metro areas would need to earn in order to purchase the median-priced home in their market.
New Yorkers: seek cheaper climes! But who wants to live in Cleveland?
