As a mother of young professionals I am grateful that they have been able to purchase their own homes. When I read the following article by Kriston Capps it explains the difficulty that other younger professionals have in becoming homeowners.
Bridging the gap between young renters and first-time home buyers is a challenge made more difficult by corporations paying for homes in cash.
By one measure, renters in most of the nation’s metro areas could afford to own a home. Not just the mortgage, but the suite of financial responsibilities involved with homeownership, from property taxes to home insurance. There’s a host of reasons why more young renters aren’t first-time home-buyers right now, but the ones that are cited the most—stay-at-home Millennials, crushing student debt loads—may not be the best explanations.
A new interactive map from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies reveals that in many metro areas across the U.S., more than 50 percent of renters could afford to own a home. To create the map, researchers used data from a variety of sources to calculate both the homeownership costs and renter incomes in 85 of the nation’s 100 largest metro areas.The lightest-colored regions on the map indicate metro areas where more than 50 percent of renters could afford the monthly payments for a home reflecting the median price for the market. In six metro areas—centered around San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, and represented by the darkest-colored regions on the map—less than 30 percent of young renters (aged 25-34 for this analysis) can afford home ownership. ” -Kriston Capps (Read More Here)
