Housing Affordability in U.S. Metropolitan Areas (2000–2025) (R)
Housing affordability has become a central economic and policy concern in the United States, particularly in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic. Rapid home price appreciation, historically low mortgage rates, and subsequent monetary tightening have jointly reshaped household purchasing power across metropolitan housing markets.
This project analyzes housing affordability across U.S. metropolitan areas from 2000–2025 by integrating multiple public data sources into a unified, reproducible analytical pipeline. The goal is to disentangle the relative contributions of home prices, financing conditions, and income growth to observed affordability dynamics.
Project Structure
Analytical Approach
The analysis combines metro-level housing price indices with prevailing mortgage rates and household income measures to construct affordability metrics over time. Exploratory analysis examines cross-metro dispersion, regime shifts around the 2008 housing crisis, and post-pandemic dynamics.
Formal modeling relies on log-linear specifications to estimate elasticities and sensitivity of affordability to interest rate changes, allowing interpretation of both short-run shocks and longer-run structural trends.