A recent study from mortgage website HSH found that a person looking to buy a home in San Diego needs to make at least $130,000.
“Prices have gone up in San Diego drastically over the last five to six years, and in the range of middle-class homes something like 400,000 to 600,000, those are the hardest ones to get into because that's where everybody's at,” says Brian Alvarado with Dwell Well Realty.
He says they aren’t enough affordable homes for working or middle-class families and many of his clients who are struggling to find a home are active duty military. “First-time home buyers, military, those types of people,” he says, “and they're priced out of the market.”
The Coldwell Banker's Annual Home Listing Report ranks the most expensive places to buy a home in the country. The top 10 cities in their 2016 report were in California in areas like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Orange County.
San Diego isn’t as bad as San Francisco or Orange County, but affordable housing is getting more and more difficult.
The top 10 cities were in California in the areas like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Orange County. “Areas like California, yes, land cost are among the biggest drivers of the challenge of building housing that is affordable to all consumers,” says Stephen Russell of the San Diego Housing Federation.
He says San Diego needs more than 143,000 affordable rental homes just to meet demand and adds that wages are not keeping up with rising home costs.
“We have an economy that doesn’t produce enough middle-income wages, and we have a market that is only producing housing at the very high end,” he says.
Alvarado adds, “Right now it's a struggle a big struggle.”
