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American Community Survey 2024 Housing Data

by Randall O'Toole, The Antiplanner, September 16, 2025

Housing affordability declined in most of the United States between 2023 and 2024, according to American Community Survey data released last week by the Census Bureau. I measure housing affordability as the ratio between median home prices and median family incomes. Nationwide, this ratio increased by less than 1 percent, from 3.53 in 2023 to 3.56 in 2024.

Value-to-income ratios below 4 are affordable as conventional mortgages can generally be paid off in less than 20 years (depending on the interest rate, of course). Ratios of 4 to 5 often require 30 year mortgages. Homes more than five times a family’s income are unaffordable to people who don’t have a huge amount of cash for a down payment because banks will not lend more to people than they can repay while keeping housing costs, including the mortgage, insurance, and property taxes, below 30 percent of their incomes.

Census income and home value data are actually collected for the year before, so home prices and incomes from the 2024 American Community Survey are actually 2023 numbers, while data from the 2023 survey are 2022 numbers, etc. For this article, I’ll refer to the years of the survey, 2019, 2023, and 2024, but this really means 2018, 2022, and 2023.

Before the pandemic, changes in housing prices were driven mainly by local factors, particularly urban-growth boundaries limiting the amount of land available for development. The pandemic resulted in a major migration that influenced affordability in many places. In states such as Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, affordability improved slightly between 2023 and 2024 because lower-income people moved out in response to high housing prices, thus increasing median incomes. In states such as Idaho and Montana, housing became a little more affordable because higher-income people moved in.

The other major factor influencing housing prices since the pandemic is labor shortages. States that have responded to high housing prices by increasing their affordable housing subsidies have exacerbated these labor shortages because workers who could be building market-rate single-family homes (the kind of homes most buyers want) are instead building subsidized multi-family homes.

Between 2023 and 2024, housing affordability improved in 14 states. In almost half the remaining states, value-to-income ratios grew by less than 2 percent. It grew by more than 5 percent in the District of Columbia and five states: Missouri, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming. The largest increase of 13 percent was in Rhode Island.

Changes in affordability were more pronounced, naturally, between 2019 and 2024. Nationwide, value-to-income ratios grew by 20 percent. Georgia, Idaho, Maine, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Tennessee all so increases of 30 to 35 percent. Value-to-income ratios declined, meaning affordability improved, by 2 percent in the District of Columbia. They increased everywhere else but by less than 10 percent in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maryland, North Dakota, and West Virginia. California’s slow growth is at least partially attributable to so many people moving out.

Table B25033 of the 2024 American Community Survey found that 74 percent of Americans live in single-family homes, 21 percent live in multi-family homes, and 5 percent live in mobile homes, with about a tenth of a percent living in boats, recreation vehicles, or vans down by the river. Surveys show that 80 percent of Americans want to live in single-family homes and if mobile homes are counted almost all of that 80 percent have reached that goal. Even if mobile homes aren’t counted, more than 80 percent live in single-family homes in Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Utah.

It is an article of faith among those who want to densify cities that American have been “forced” or at least incentivized to live in single-family homes by federal mortgage insurance, zoning laws, and other government regulations. If people really wanted to live in multi-family housing, you’d think they’d jump at the opportunities offered by many states that are promoting denser housing. Yet those states haven’t been very successful.

Despite highly restrict policies against construction of new single-family homes, since 2010 the percentage of Californians living in single-family homes declined from 71.57 to 71.36 percent while the percentage in Oregon increased from 73.91 to 73.99. The densifiers’ biggest hope is Washington state, where the percentage living in single-family homes declined from 74.15 percent in 2010 to 73.13 percent in 2024. If this rate of change can be sustained, the state will be able to reduce the share living in single-family homes to 50 percent in about 400 years.