Is home affordability really declining?

[Polina Ryshakov]

It’s painful to see people pulling back from the market in fears of overpaying because of false narrative that affordability is declining. No economic theory, and no policy works perfectly in isolation. It’s not accurate to use median household income to measure affordability. You may ask why, it’s not a good measure because it doesn’t account for savings or passive income or profit from the stock market. Median household income reported by census only measures wages. And rarely do stabs at measuring affordability use real vs. nominal dollars.