We computed price-to-income for every neighborhood in America. A third are out of reach of the people who live there.

Take every populated census tract in America. Divide its median home value by its median household income. That single ratio — how many years of gross income the local house costs — is the sharpest affordability lens public data offers, because it compares each neighborhood to its own residents, not to a national abstraction.

We ran it on all 84,000 tracts. Here's the distribution.

The numbers

Median tract: 3.7x. Source: IQ Locations analysis of 2024 ACS 5-year data.

The old banker's rule said a house should cost about three years of income. By that rule, less than a third of American neighborhoods still qualify — and more than a quarter have crossed 5x, the line where a median local household can't realistically buy the median local house at all.

The geography is the story. In California, 84% of all tracts sit at 5x or worse. Washington state: 66%. Florida: 37%. Then the cliff — Texas: 13%. Illinois: 11%. Ohio: 4%. These aren't different shades of one housing market; they're different countries with different rules for who gets to move where.

Why this belongs in site analysis

Price-to-income predicts household formation — and household formation is where several retail categories eat.

High-ratio neighborhoods lock young households out of buying. They rent longer, move more often, and delay the life events (first home, first kid) that drive whole categories of spending. That's structural tailwind for the renter economy — the laundromats, the storage units, the apartment-adjacent convenience formats we've written about — and structural headwind for the first-lawn, first-garage categories.

Low-ratio neighborhoods are where the 30-year-old can still buy, and they're absorbing the migration out of the 5x states. The county growth data we'll publish next month shows exactly where those movers land — and it's overwhelmingly the under-4x metros of Texas, Florida, and the Southeast. The affordability map is the leading indicator; the growth map is the lagging confirmation.

One honest limitation: ACS home values are owner-estimated and top-coded, and in fast-moving markets the five-year average lags the current listing prices — so the true ratios in 2024's hottest markets are, if anything, worse than what we've computed.

The ratio for any specific trade area — along with the renter share, the age curve, and the income distribution that give it meaning — is one demographic report away. Thirty seconds, versus finding out in year two why the first-time-buyer category you built for has no first-time buyers.