As if anyone needed further evidence of a local housing affordability crisis, a new study found that home prices in the Cincinnati metro area rose at three times the speed of wages over the past five years.
The average price for a house in Cincinnati grew by 30.1% during that time, compared to an average 10.5% increase in wages, according to an analysis by the website Construction Coverage. Researchers crunched numbers from Zillow and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for their findings.
Of course, that's shitty news if you'd one day like to own a place in the Queen City — where the median home price is $183,422 and the median annual wage is $39,620, per the study — but other metros appear to have it worse. Far worse.
Housing prices in the Las Vegas area grew 6.8 times faster than incomes over the past five years, making it the U.S. metro with the largest such ratio, researchers found. The Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia metro in North and South Carolina ranked second, with housing prices growing 4.6 times faster than income.
Nearby Ohio neighbor Columbus also saw home prices increasing 3.1 times as much as income.
Cincinnati in the top 20 large metros where home prices are outpacing wages according to Construction Coverage's list of all U.S. metros with at least 100,000 residents.
The increase in home prices has outpaced income growth in nearly 90% of the urban areas on its list.
