As if anyone needed further evidence of a local housing affordability crisis, a new study found that home prices in the San Antonio-New Braunfels metro area rose at double the speed of wages over the past five years.
The average price for a house in San Antonio grew by 32.2% during that time, compared to an average 16.1% increase in wages, according to an analysis by the website Construction Coverage. Researchers crunched numbers from Zillow and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for their findings.
Of course, that’s shitty news if you’d one day like to own a place in the Alamo City, but other metros have it worse, according to the study. Far worse.
Housing prices in the Las Vegas area grew 6.8 times faster than incomes over the past five years, making it the U.S. metro with the largest such ratio, researchers found.
San Antonio also lagged behind Texas neighbors including the Dallas-Fort Worth area (where housing grew 3.7 times faster), Houston (2.7 times faster) and Austin (2.5 times faster).
Indeed, San Antonio only ranked 34th on Construction Coverage’s list of all U.S. metros with at least 100,000 residents. The increase in home prices has outpaced income growth in nearly 90 percent of the urban areas on its list.
Stay on top of San Antonio news and views. Sign up for our Weekly Headlines Newsletter.
Related Stories
This article appears in Oct 7-20, 2020.
