A new national housing affordability report has confirmed something many renters already know: The possibility of owning a home is moving further out of reach for many renters across America.
Becoming a new homeowner is especially challenging for households in several major U.S. metros — including Dallas — where it now takes well over a decade to save enough money for a down payment on a starter home.
These findings were unveiled in a new study from The Julian Bond Institute for Financial Equity Research (JBI), a nonprofit research branch of the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL). The report comes as a result of its Project 2050 Survey that analyzed "Americans' financial aspirations across generations and racial groups and the obstacles they encounter in achieving them."
JBI said Americans of all generations, racial backgrounds, and ethnicities haven't given up on "this aspect of the American dream," but the journey towards becoming a homeowner is "grow[ing] exceedingly challenging." In addition to saving for a down payment and closing costs, renters must also navigate high mortgage rates and high home prices. All of these combined factors have pushed monthly payments out of reach for most families.
"There has been much coverage of the difficulty aspiring homeowners face in being able to afford the monthly payments on a home loan," the report said. "But less attention has been given to an equally important part of the housing affordability squeeze: The impact that higher home prices and the affordability crisis are having on the ability of families to save enough money to afford the upfront costs of homeownership."
Using the results from a previous 2019 survey and the most recent survey results, JBI examined how many years it would take a typical renter family to save enough money to cover a down payment and closing costs for a starter home in the U.S. and in its 10 biggest metros.
The report found that it now takes the typical Dallas renter household 12 years to save for a starter home in 2026, up from 7 years in 2019. And Dallas technically appears on the lower end of the spectrum out of the 10 biggest U.S. metros.
"Although there is some variation across these areas, even in Houston — where the years to save is the lowest — it would take the typical aspiring homeowner 11 years to save enough money to purchase a starter home," the report said. "At the opposite end of the spectrum, in Los Angeles, it would take 24 years. And in all these areas, there has been a sizable increase in the number of years required to save since 2019."
For the typical American household, it now takes 16 years to save for a starter home, a figure that has doubled since 2019. That's based on an American median renter household income of $57,991, and an estimated saving rate of 2.63 percent. The report defines the saving rate as the percentage of a family’s income that can be set aside for the purchase of a home after expenditures, assuming that aspiring homeowner families can devote 75 percent of their savings toward a home purchase.
"[This] translates to annual savings of roughly $1,525," the report found. "For such a family, it would take 16 years to accumulate enough savings to purchase a starter home [at the median price of $335,574]."
Renter households that made $42,750 in income at a 3.96 saving rate would result in $1,693 saved for the purchase of a home in 2019. By those metrics, it would take the typical renter household eight years to save for a starter home at the 2019 median price of $217,520.
This is how many years it takes to save for a starter home in the 10 biggest U.S. metros compared to 2019, from longest to shortest:
- Los Angeles: 24 years, up from 14 years in 2019
- New York City: 23 years, up from 10 years
- Miami: 22 years, up from 10 years
- Washington, D.C.: 16 years, up from 8 years
- Chicago: 15 years, up from 8 years
- Philadelphia: 15 years, up from 8 years
- Phoenix: 15 years, up from 8 years
- Atlanta: 13 years, up from 7 years
- Dallas: 12 years, up from 7 years
- Houston: 11 years, up from 8 years
