> Two is that we're highly skewed to a handful of elite metros, whose housing markets are not representative of the country as a whole. Housing is expensive in San Francisco, New York, LA, and DC. But in places like Tampa, Omaha, Cincinnati, and Phoenix the cost of housing (per square foot) has barely gone up at all.
I think cities are fundamentally the wrong unit to look at when thinking about housing prices.
What we really want to know is "how much does it cost to live some place where I can get a job". Knowing that Tampa is just as cheap today as it was 40 years ago means little if Tampa today has, say, only 70% of the jobs that it did back then.
What we really need is some sort of normalized "job availability unit" like "per capita" but "per employment opportunity" and then try to calculate current and historical housing costs relative to that.
> "how much does it cost to live some place where I can get a job"
And we'd do well to price that in hours of work per week after taxes, including commute.
That is, making $30 an hour where a house is $300k can be better than making $60 an hour where a house is $600k . Think about progressive tax rates, CoL, commute time et al.
I think cities are fundamentally the wrong unit to look at when thinking about housing prices.
What we really want to know is "how much does it cost to live some place where I can get a job". Knowing that Tampa is just as cheap today as it was 40 years ago means little if Tampa today has, say, only 70% of the jobs that it did back then.
What we really need is some sort of normalized "job availability unit" like "per capita" but "per employment opportunity" and then try to calculate current and historical housing costs relative to that.