Suits: Seattle looking like California with extreme spending on housing

According to an article from The Seattle Times, the number of people with homes valued at three or more times their income has risen to 80% amongst Seattle area homeowners. This is sometimes referred to as “house rich, cash poor.”

This comes from new data released from the 2021 American Housing Survey (AHS) from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

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The AHS first got data on the value of Seattle homes in 2013, when the median home value was 3.3 times the median salary. With the new 2021 data, this ratio jumped to 4.9.

Comparatively, the median home value to income ratio in the country as a whole was 3.3 in 2021, only a slight increase from 3.0 in 2011.

Seattle is ranked sixth in the highest home value-to-income ratio, with 25 metro areas surveyed. Four of the top five ranked metros are in California.

“So anyway, Seattle ranks sixth amongst the 25 metro areas in the survey for the home value ratio to income. Four of the five metros with the highest are, of course, in California,” Bryan Suits said on The Bryan Suits Show on KTTH 770 AM. “Very common when you get those neighbors when they move up here and buy a house for $1.5 million in cash or something because it’s a tiny little cabin in Burbank they moved in 1968. And everything is overvalued there, and then the closer you get here in Seattle, though, the dip is coming.”

You can listen to Bryan Suits’ full discussion of housing in Seattle here:

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Listen to the Bryan Suits Show weekday mornings from 6–9 a.m. on KTTH 770 AM (HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here.

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