A Blueprint for Creating a Housing Affordability Study

This article presents a simple, cost-free how-to guide for creating a multiperspective housing affordability report for any U.S. metropolitan area. It provides direct data sources, detailed calculations, and illustrative examples and demonstrates how the analysis can be repeated over time and/or across regions to provide temporal and spatial context. Intended for individual researchers and real estate centers alike, this article is a practical resource for producing a data-driven report that can help foster informed discussions and guide policy decisions on this critical issue.