City Housing Less Affordable, Study Says; Could It Say More?

New York University's Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy has cranked out another annual State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods. The initial focus of the report appears to be on the growing, gnawing lack of housing affordability for much of the city:

The report... finds that the median home sales price in New York City rose by 68 percent from 2000 to 2005, adjusting for inflation. This is welcome news for existing homeowners, but it also means that homeownership is harder to attain. Fewer than 5 percent of home sales in 2005 were affordable to New Yorkers earning the City's median income ($43,434), down from 11 percent in 2000.

One wonders, however, how much worse this affordability crisis has become--but the above statistic and its conclusion, like others throughout the report, come from numbers that are now at least 15 months old. The report, then, for example, pre-dates the subprime-mortgage imbroglio and the cooling of the national housing market.

Still, it may be worth your perusal.

- Tom Acitelli