Asheville NC affordability metric

It is no surprise to anyone that the past year 2022 has seen the biggest housing bubble in US history resulting in home prices that have pushed many first time home buyers out of the market. The high sticker price of homes associated with higher mortgage rates has also produced the lowest home buyer sentiment in more than a decade according to Fannie Mae’s home purchase Sentiment Index.

Asheville North Carolinas housing bubble has resulting in exorbitant home prices despite the median household income of roughly $60,000 according to the U.S. Census. For a person making just the median income they would have to spend 7x their annual income for $422,000 home.

This ratio, household income to home prices (price to earnings P/E), can function as an affordability metric. We can map this value over time in Asheville to produce a picture of how housing affordability has changed over time.

The graph above uses annual wage data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, and the median home prices from Zillows ZHVI data series which tracks home prices. Each data point represents average home prices and reported wages for a quarterly period in a year going back to 2002. The fluctuations from peaks to valleys represent the seasonal differences in home values.

Until the value comes close to the average, affordability and home prices are out of reach for the average worker in Asheville NC.

Thanks to Reventure Consulting for inspiration in creating this graph. If you are interested in tracking data on the US housing market I highly recommend Nick Gerli’s YouTube channel and you can track data yourself using the Reventure app from Reventure Consulting.

About this graph

This graph was build using D3.js, a JavaScript library for visualizing data. It was written in Typescript, unit tested with Jest, and linted by ESLint and Stylelint. The build system is using Vite. You can view the source code on GitHub.

Updates

Updates to the data in the graph will be made periodically.