The absolute upper limit of what can be considered affordable for a home is 4x your income. Ideally it should be 3x, but 4x is the limit for reasonably stretching your budget.
Using Sacramento as an example, median home price is about $510k, and median household income is about $85,000
That number for Sacramento is 6x, and that's for a middling city with middling employment prospects. So the entire city for almost everyone living there is by definition unaffordable. And that's not as bad as it gets
Let's look at Toronto. Median income is around $91,000, median home price is just over $1,100,000. That's a ratio of 12:1. You would need to be making a quarter of a million dollars just to be able to qualify for a mortgage.
For a home to be affordable, one of two things need to happen: 1) incomes need to rise astronomically overnight or 2) home prices need to crash astronomically overnight
In Sacramento, that means the median income needs to double (to $170k per year), or home prices need to crash by 50%
In Toronto, that means incomes need to quadruple (to $370k per year) or home prices need to crash about 75%
This is how bad the housing crisis is. I don't think people truly understand the gravity of how bad it is. Home prices should not be this high. Incomes should not be this low. Look back 100 years and you won't find a time when affordability was this bad for everyone everywhere. Things must change
