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America’s housing nightmare has a new epicenter – Los Angeles.
The City of Angels was ranked dead last among America’s 100 largest metropolitan areas for home affordability and homebuilding, earning an embarrassing “F” on Realtor.com’s national housing report card.
The numbers behind the failing grade are brutal.
The typical Los Angeles-area home is listed for $1,129,415, while the median household earns just $91,380 a year.
For a median earner trying to buy that typical home with a 10% down payment and a 6.5% 30-year mortgage, the monthly payment would consume a staggering 84.4% of their income, the research found.
That’s nearly three times the 30% threshold commonly used as a benchmark for housing affordability.
To drag the mortgage payment down to that threshold, a buyer would need a staggering 68% down payment – about $768,000.
“Put simply, a monthly mortgage payment on the typical home in LA is not affordable to typical income-earners,” Realtor.com Senior Economist Joel Berner said.
The study graded the country’s 100 largest metro areas using a combination of affordability and homebuilding measures, with the two broad categories weighted equally.
Los Angeles-Long Beach finished with an overall score of just 12 out of 100 – the lowest in America – including a microscopic 0.9 affordability component score and a homebuilding score of 23.1.
Any overall score of 30 or below earned an automatic F.
And LA isn’t exactly building its way out of the mess.
The region posted a permit-to-population ratio of just 0.47, meaning it is permitting fewer than half as many homes per resident as the national average, “so supply-side price relief is not likely to be felt by buyers any time soon,” the authors wrote.
The bleak report card comes even as LA home prices have shown some signs of softening, with prices down from a year earlier.
LA wasn’t the only California giant humiliated in the rankings, with much of the Golden State clustered at the bottom of the class.
Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura ranked 95th, San Francisco-Oakland 94th, San Diego 92nd, Stockton-Lodi 91st and San Jose 90th – all receiving Fs.
Riverside also flunked, ranking 88th with a score of 29.9, although its relatively strong homebuilding score of 50.5 offered a possible bright spot for future buyers.
In total, seven of the 13 metros that received an F were in California.
The other six were Providence, Rhode Island; New York-Newark; Honolulu, Hawaii; Boston, Massachusetts; Worcester, Massachusetts; and Miami-Fort Lauderdale.
At the opposite end of the report card was Des Moines, Iowa, which topped the class for affordability and homebuilding.
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