The State Where It Is Hardest for Women to Buy Homes

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 30, 11:30AM EDT

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The State Where It Is Hardest for Women to Buy Homes — © DenisTangneyJr / E+ via Getty Images

The U.S. housing boom of the last two years is close to unprecedented. Home prices have soared since the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The rate at which home prices have risen in the last year is clear based on data from the carefully followed S&P Case-Shiller index. In recent months, nationwide, home prices have risen by about 20% per month, year over year. In a few markets, which include Tampa and Phoenix, the number has hit 30%.

Several factors have fueled the run up in prices. One is that mortgage rates dropped under 3% for 30 year fixed rates loans. Those days are over. Recently mortgage rates rose close to 5%.
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Americans also became more mobile. The number of people who could work from home rose by millions as businesses shuttered their offices due to the pandemic. People could move from where they had to live for work to where they wanted to live for lifestyle reasons. The movement of the population was most pronounced as people left expensive coastal cities which included New York and San Francisco to metros inland.

According to new research from Consumer Affairs, the ability to buy a home varies considerably by gender. The results were published by analysts in a paper entitled “How Long It Takes For Women To Afford a House Compared To Men.” “To determine how long it takes women to save enough money for a home, we first looked at the median pay for women in each state along with the median down payment in each state,” according to the methodology. Most of the information came from the U.S. Census and Realtor.com.

Which state requires the most time for women to save for a down payment based on income and home prices? Rhode Island tops the list at 29 years, 10 months, and 10 days. While the figure seems absurd, based on the methodology in most states the number is longer than 12 years.

One conclusion the study shows for certain is that the chance for home ownership among women in the U.S. is long enough that many will never be home owners.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.