Take that, Big Apple. Boston is now a more expensive place to buy a home than New York, a new report finds. Plus, our paychecks are bigger too.
Sure, Manhattan prices remain in a league of their own. But Boston metro market, which includes suburbs spread across Eastern Massachusetts, has a median home price of just under $400,000, having risen about 4 percent over the past year.
That’s a shade above the comparable number for New York and its own surrounding swath of suburban sprawl, which weighs in at just over $396,000, Interest.com finds in a new report that tracks housing costs in the nation’s top 25 metro markets.
“Boston is a pretty expensive place,” notes Mike Sante, Interest.com’s managing editor.
But that’s not all. When it comes to median income, Greater Boston enjoys an even more sizable lead, with median income topping out at nearly $73,000, or third in the country, behind only Washington, D.C. ($90,149) and San Francisco ($79,624).
That’s compared to $65,786 in New York and its suburbs.
But while our home prices and paychecks are higher, New York does hold the lead in a rather dubious category: property taxes. The average property tax bill in Greater New York is a whopping $7,400 a year compared to the still high, but a little more manageable $4,600 a year in the Boston area.
All that said, both Boston and New York do share one thing in common: Both rank near the very bottom in affordability in Interest.com’s ranking of the nation’s 25 metro markets.
Boston comes in at 20th and New York at 23rd, with Boston, despite having a higher median home price, actually considered slightly more affordable because our paychecks our higher. By contrast, the most affordable major metro markets in the country right now are Minneapolis and Atlanta.
Nationally, housing costs just keep rising, with paychecks struggling – and largely failing – to keep up.
No new phenomenon, it is part of a larger trend that has been taking shape over the past three decades that has seen housing costs rise faster than pay, Sante believes.
Boston is no exception, having seen a 4 percent jump in home prices so far in 2014, compared to a 1.6 percent increase in median pay.
Interest.com handed Boston a “D-” for affordability, or lack thereof, with the median paycheck in Greater Boston falling short by more than 15 percent of what’s needed to buy the median priced home.
New York got an F.
“In those cities with the least affordable housing, the failure of paychecks to keep up with rapidly rising housing costs is reaching crisis proportions,” Sante said.