The Most Expensive Housing Market in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Sep 9, 7:40AM EDT · Published Sep 7, 9:07AM EDT

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The carefully followed S&P Case-Shiller index, which covers housing prices each month, showed that these rose to an all-time high in June.
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The carefully followed S&P Case-Shiller index, which covers housing prices each month, showed that these rose to an all-time high in June. The housing market remains tight. People with 3% mortgages do not want to give their homes up. People who face 7% mortgages often cannot afford a new home and need to rent.

Another measure of home prices, which includes the top 50 metros by population, is one from Realtor.com. Based on their research, the median prices of a home for sale in the United States in August was $429,990. That is up by 36.2% from August 2019.

There is an extreme wide dollar difference in terms of home prices between markets where incomes are low compared to those with the highest incomes in the nation. At the bottom of the list is an old industry city. The median price for homes for sale in Cleveland is $269,000. Very close to that bottom are Detroit and Buffalo at $279,900. All three are located across the belt around Lake Erie where the car industry dominated the economies in the middle of the last century. Poverty rates in these cities have risen as populations have dropped.

The city with the highest median price of homes for sale is in the middle of the area where the tech industry is the dominant employer. In San Jose, the figure is 1,399,000. The only other city above $1 million is Los Angeles at $1,190,000.

The numbers show just how much the job market influences what people pay for homes.

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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.