Where Is The Affordable Housing?
According to Realtor.com the median home listing price in America was $340,000 at the start of 2021. That one caught me by surprise when I looked it up, I didn’t think it would be that high.
The National Association of Realtors® has the median sales price at $303,900 as of this writing. That’s sales price and not listing price, but either way they’re both pretty high.
Lastly Zillow has the average home value (different measure again) at around $269,000 as of this post. I find Zillow’s estimates to be commonly off, so perhaps they are too low. You get the picture though, as I posted back in September housing is still on a tear.
In that September post I highlighted a great mapping tool that let’s you explore the median list price of homes in every zip code in America along with changes in month-over-month and year-over-year increments. Being that prices are going up so much, this post will highlight a new tool to help with that issue.
I have a way of sniffing these things out from the dark corners of the internet.
Where Is The Affordable Housing?
Social Explorer has a great interactive map that shows housing units valued at less than $100,000 using data from the Census Bureau. The really great thing about this map is that they give you so many ways to break down the data. You can view it by state, county, county subdivision, census tract, census block, zip code, census place, MSA, and even congressional district.
Here’s what it looks like aggregated by state: (click for larger image)
As you can see my mouse was hovered over Missouri and they give you just a few key data points. Missouri has 1,611,986 owner-occupied housing units, of which 440,133 are valued at under $100,000. So 27.3% of Missouri’s housing units are valued below $100k.
This is what it looks like by county: (click for larger image)
The teal-to-blue shades have a higher percentage of houses under $100k. The yellow-to-beige shades have a lower number. As is expected the middle and southern parts of the country have a higher availability of affordable houses.
So can you use this map to find a great place to live with a higher percentage of affordable houses?
Correlation = Causation
I know what you’re thinking. The counties that have a higher percentage of affordable houses are going to be counties with a low median income and few job opportunities.
Just glancing at the county map above you can clearly see the high income “brunch-belt” – the corridor from Washington D.C. to Boston – with it’s low number of affordable houses. And you can see the very low income Appalachia region in Southwestern Virginia and Eastern Kentucky with the opposite.
This is where Accidental FIRE goes above and beyond, because I’m a hopeless map and data dork.
What if we married up the percentage of affordable houses in each county with the median household income in each county and looked for outliers? Logic and market forces would say that counties with a higher median income would have a lower percentage of homes valued under $100k, and vice versa.
I live in the Washingon D.C. region which has the highest median household incomes in America, and I can attest there’s nothing in this region that I know of priced below $100k. Some people in D.C. pay that much for a parking spot to go with their million dollar one bedroom condo!
Let’s Do This
Unfortunately Social Explorer does not make the data used in their affordable housing map available for download. So I had to go get it myself from the Census Bureau website. Ugh, those government websites are the worst and they make it so hard to find things. But I’m paid extravagantly as a professional blogger, so like a pro I did the work 🙂
And then I retrieved the median household income data by county. Both are for 2019 as the official 2020 data does not get released until September this year.
So here’s my little experiment. There are 3142 counties in America according to the Census Bureau. I ranked them all by the percentage of houses under $100,000, highest to lowest. Then I ranked them all by median household income highest to lowest.
Then I looked for outliers. Are there any counties that have a relatively large percentage of their total housing units valued at under $100,000, but that also have a relatively high median household income?
In other words, where can you relocate to where you can make a great comparative salary and have lots of affordable housing available? Housing is the biggest of the big three expenses after all for most of us, so the more you can save on that the faster you can achieve financial independence.
Affordable Housing, The Outliers
First I tried looking at the top 10% in each of the two categories. There were no matches. So the top 314 counties by percent of affordable houses have no matches to the top 314 in median household income. I then went to the top 20% (628 counties) for each category.
Bingo. There are matches.
If you give me your email address and subscribe to my newsletter, I’ll reveal the winners… Haha, I’m not that kind of blogger.
There are 7 counties in America that fall in the top 20% of all counties for affordable housing (percent of houses under $100,000), and that also fall in the top 20% of counties for median household income.
Drumroll please….
I’ll list these in rank order by median household income, since that’s probably a more important measure for many folks. Each also has a link to Google Maps and to Realtor.com showing current home listings under $100,000.
#1 – Loving County, Texas map homes under $100,000
Median Household Income $83,750, and 57.9% of it’s houses are valued at under $100k.
#2 – Steele County, North Dakota map homes under $100,000K
Median Household Income $70,724, and 54.7% of it’s houses are valued at under $100k.
#3 – Oldham County, Texas map homes under $100,000K
Median Household Income $64,545, and 55.2% of it’s houses are valued at under $100k.
#4 – Aurora County, South Dakota map homes under $100,000K
Median Household Income $64,083, and 54.2% of it’s houses are valued at under $100k.
#5 – Greenlee County, Arizona map homes under $100,000K
Median Household Income $63,473, and 63.2% of it’s houses are valued at under $100k.
#6 – Wallace County, Kansas map homes under $100,000K
Median Household Income $63,269, and 58.0% of it’s houses are valued at under $100k.
#7 – Ward County, Texas map homes under $100,000K
Median Household Income $62,986, and 55.1% of it’s houses are valued at under $100k.
Look, I didn’t say these are the most awesome places to live. I’m here to analyze the data and show it as is 🙂 As with anything, including a location, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
With today’s pandemic-fueled work from home movement you might be inclined to not care about the median income of an area. If you can work from anywhere it doesn’t matter if there are jobs nearby.
In that case, here are the top ten counties solely ranked by the percentage of homes valued at $100,000 or under. I hope you like Texas…..
| COUNTY | Percent of Homes < $100K |
| King County, Texas | 96.2% |
| Stonewall County, Texas | 90.2% |
| McDowell County, West Virginia | 88.1% |
| Hardeman County, Texas | 86.6% |
| Hudspeth County, Texas | 86.3% |
| Knox County, Texas | 86.2% |
| Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota | 85.9% |
| Hall County, Texas | 85.4% |
| Todd County, South Dakota | 84.3% |
Geoarbitrage
So there you have it financial warriors, a cool mapping tool that shows the percentage of affordable houses valued under $100,000 in America. And some added analysis incorporating median household incomes from yours truly.
I post lots of tools like this that show various aspects of money and finance from a location perspective. If you’re considering Geoarbitrage in the United States this mapping tool can help you find affordable housing.
Also be sure to check out my Geoarbitrage Resources Page that has tons of great tools to help you find your perfect location.
I hope you find these resources handy and I will continue to expose valuable tools that can help when deciding on a geoarbitrage strategy.
Nice! Thanks for crunching all those numbers. It would be cool to have a Wiki style page / spreadsheet where people could add various metrics. I would add does the city have a good amount of hiking / biking trails.
Check out my Geoarbitrage Resources page, I have links to tons of tools to help you find all kinds of correlating measures. There are also links to some great sites that try to do all of those things themselves like BestPlaces and AreaVibes.
Wow under 100k. And I thought I lived in a moderate housing area in Delaware because you can still buy in the 2xxk range. Puts things in perspective to how inexpensive it still is in spots and how we view things as relative to local.
Yeah seriously. Many forget how cheap it can be in some areas, but along with that how little the people there often make.
Good data and valid disclaimer, “may not be awesome places to live.” Wonder how many of those homes are manufactured (mobile homes or trailers) and/or old? There’s an article on the Guardian, “What happened when Walmart left”, that gives a sense of some of the issues of one of the locales, McDowell county, WV, that may keep or drive down those home prices. Keep up the good work with the maps and data.
Wow – THANKS for that article I just read it. Being in the DC area I recreate in West Virginia a lot and most don’t realize how poor some of those communities are. Many think of inner city poverty when they think of poverty at all but rural Appalachia takes the cake for poverty in my view.
You are worth every penny of your HIGH pay for blogging! I guess I should move to Texas.
Thank boss, now give me a raise! 🙂
If you get super bored, 😆 (or I –>homework assignment<–), wouldn't it be interesting to couple in climate, air quality, and tax obligations? Great post, Dave! And yes, thanks for all the # crunching. Texas does have sea turtles!
Haha, thanks for the assignment. Well climate is subjective so for that you have to do your own research. There’s this resource for Air Quality which I need to add to my Geoarbitrage Resources page. And there’s lots of sites for taxes although most aggregate by state and might not include local taxes, but you can search for those and experiment.
Now marrying them all up together and doing the GIS analysis for the best is where the real work comes. It’s hard work, that’s why I semi-retired, to do it less 😉
Oooh, thanks so much for that air quality resource! And for all those map resources listed on your Geoarbitrage page. Very cool stuff! I realized after I hit submit, I meant to make it clearer it could be a fun homework exercise for me. So sorry about that lack of clarity! Absolutely, you deserve all the time off your FI life provides! Happy St Patty’s Day. 😊☘️
haha no problem, I was curious enough to check those things out for myself anyway!
texas! i’m not even sure i want to visit or have a layover there. i never did get to austin while mrs. smidlap was still going to sxsw with expenses paid on the company dime. i can tell you this state income tax thing has me interested in relocating than income at this point in our lives. we got nailed with about 6% last year on some capital gains being taxed as ordinary income right from the first f’ing dollar! at least the electrical grid comes back up after it goes down here. you get a little bit of what you pay for.
we should go to florida, give ourselves a raise, and walk around barefoot all year ’round eating oysters.
Those NY taxes are ridiculous, and you’re not even in the city. Texas is pretty darn free and low tax, although the influx of folks to Austin might start to slowly change that dynamic.
c’mon-while I like your blog and love maps too this analysis should come with a big asterisk. The big red flag that jumped out at me was when you listed Loving County. Any demographer knows right away that’s the least populous county in the entire United States. Looking at the rest of your list, two of those counties have ~10k people total while the rest are all 5k or fewer. In other words, the counties you’ve listed simply don’t have many people, which means your analysis suffers from a probable outlier problem. If just a few people in these counties say (and they could be lying) they make $1m then they are going to really skew the data for that county.
I just showed the data as is, don’t shoot the messenger. I didn’t know that Loving County was the least populous in the contiguous 48 but thanks for pointing that out. Regardless, my intent was to simply correlate the data and show the answers, I didn’t claim I was going to curate the results and look for the best places within the results. And I did asterisk the whole thing by saying that I made no claim they were good places to live. The data are what the data are.
The main point of the post was to highlight the interactive map, you can explore for yourself to find low housing prices in locales that are desirable to you. Along with other tools I in my Geoarbitrage Resources Page you can really get a lot information about places.
You know I always love these maps of yours and the analysis here is amazing and very intriguing. Looks like Texas is the place. This should be a go-to for those looking to geoarbitrage to new areas with decent income opportunities. Anyway, now I’m off to go play with this killer tool and do some of my own analysis. Thanks for all the effort you put in on this Dave!
Thanks dude, I love discovering tools like this and spreading the joy. The power of place is always fascinating
Thank you for putting this together and sharing it so freely! I instantly thought this might be a good tool to use when looking for real estate opportunities as well.
As a 7th generation Texan there’s no way I’d move back. Not even for the low taxes. There is a reason it’s so cheap!
Hello they can’t keep the lights or water on-this most recent is only an example of their terrible management of resources and services
Hot & Humid = miserable
Hurricanes and other extreme weather abounds and is rapidly getting worse/more violent
Tons of biting bugs and other venomous creatures abound
It’s not the prettiest of states in most areas.
There are a few months where certain areas have decent weather and there is some natural beauty but….
Any moment now a Texan will chime in extolling it’s virtues but to me it seems like what most are really proud of is their ability to love the suck. Yup they are so tough they can thrive there but not smart enough to see where they really are for what it is.
Ouch, so you’re not a fan huh 😉 I hear ya, for me most of Texas would be too hot in summers and even for some shoulder seasons. I don’t do well in extreme heat, although I hear the beaches at South Padre Island are nice. But climate is a very subjective thing.
Yeah I’m really not at this point. I actually grew up in South Texas near Padre Island and yes there are some pretty parts. But unless you are literally on the beach the heat and humidity is pretty killer. 90+ degrees and 90% humidity
As a beach lover I have found much prettier beaches in other areas though Texas is much cheaper to live near or on the beach (but once again it’s cheap for a reason)
If you want low taxes and are ok with heat and humidity Florida would give you a much prettier beach than Texas.
As for all those relocating to Texas from other areas especially from the East or West coasts be aware that a lot of my Facebook feed from Texans to the newcomers is they don’t want you there.
If they offered me double my salary I’d move to Austin but it would be for a limited time while I banked that dough and then got the heck out.
If you want the tax benefits but don’t want to live there and are planning lots of travel you could domicile there and not actually spend much time in the state.
Texas looks like the winner. Maybe that’s why so many Californians are moving there. Hahaha. 🙂
It’s like a superhighway from CA to Texas, mostly Austin!
Enough of us Californians move to Texas we might get to keep the culture, gain bbq, all while losing the taxes!! Jokes aside…this is quite an interesting map. Too bad I’m not in the market for an investment rental property. This map would make a perfect search starter.
Texifornia? I’m sure that’s been used before but I’d like to thunk I invented it
Texifornia? I’m sure that’s been used before but I’d like to think I invented it
Another fun mapping-data correlation to think through, Dave! I wonder if the pricing data “lags” behind income data in this case as some of the oil economy has had its bubble taken out of it.
Thanks, as always, for finding these fun and thought-provoking associations!
It’s likely that the two measures are not in sync, but that’s the problem with trying any analysis like this. We do the best we can with the data we have, glad you enjoyed it!
It’s amazing how affordable some of those places in Texas are. I was quite surprised. I’ve been to most of the big cities in Texas, and you’d be hard pressed to even find a condo for that much.
Even with this work from home climate I think prices will continue to be higher near areas with nice amenities — entertainment, nice parks, good cultural diversity, shopping, good schools, and so forth. There’s a reason people cluster in those areas, and it’s more than just about jobs.
Yes, and one of the top 7 counties from my analysis is right outside of Amarillo, a sizable city of 200,000 people.