I’ve expalined this many times but the median income HH does not, can not, should not and never will buy the median priced house in a given area again. The only exception was in the recent past when income was irrelevant due to liar loans and anyone could buy whatever they wanted if they had a good FICO score and enough nerve.
One last time:
Approximately 50 to 60% of households own their homes and they very heavily skew toward higher incomes. Thus a broad generalization (admittedly far from perfect but more accurate than not) is that the top 50% of HH buy homes. Of these HH the median income to look at is actually the 75th percentile not the 50th percentile. Add in a high cost area such as So Cal and we skew even higher toward higher income HH’s for home ownership. So if you want a better approximation of how overpriced we are compare the 75th percentile to the median price.
I know this is far from perfect but I believe it will give you a far more realistic figure than comaring the median income with the median priced home.
