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For those looking for cheap cities to live, I've found Zillow's data [1] on mortgage price to income ratio data [2] interesting.

Some choice datapoints:

    San Francisco, CA 9.1817795575535
    Boston, MA        4.9264239374417
    New York, NY      5.5458400782590
    Detroit, MI       2.22905530728586
    St. Louis, MO     2.4588523706753
I think the national average is around 3.1 and around 3.0 is considered "healthy" (your mortgage costs about 3x your yearly income).

[1] http://www.zillow.com/research/data/

[2] http://files.zillowstatic.com/research/public/Affordability_...



Interesting to see how much Portland spiked in the last decade, from ~3 to >5. I wonder how much of the surrounding area that includes? I've seen housing prices skyrocket in Portland, but much less so in surrounding areas. (They've still increased, but I'd hypothesize that they haven't increased nearly as much as within Portland. I'd love to see separated data to check that hypothesis, though.)


It looks like they're using a metro region. If you take a look at their "county crosswalk" [1] data that might give more information about it. For example NYC is "MetroRegionID_Zillow" 394913 that has a corresponding "RegionID" in the price to income dataset.

[1] http://files.zillowstatic.com/research/public/CountyCrossWal...


I've seen articles showing Portland and Seattle increasing 10+% per year for the last 4 years. So yeah. Not sure what specifically is going on in portland though. Hear about Seattle tech a lot more.




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