A new report appears to the show the true extent of the U.S. housing crisis.
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) spending appears to have no effect on lowing housing prices, according to a recent report by government spending watchdog OpenTheBooks.com, which analyzed data released by the U.S. Census Bureau and Federal Housing Finance Agency from 2015 to 2024. Additionally, the data suggests it that homeownership has become harder to attain in nearly every state regardless of partisan lean.
"Americans are rightly focused on affordability issues on the heels of years of historic inflation and new pressure on energy prices. Those macroeconomic factors have put homebuying out of reach for many Americans," a spokesperson for OpenTheBooks.com told the DCNF.
The report defines the disparity between the change in house prices and the change in household income as the "affordability gap."
The average affordability gap across all 50 states was 42.67%, whereas the 2024 Presidential Election's seven battleground states averaged 54.77% — with Pennsylvania being the outlier at 34.79%.
However, housing affordability is not affected by whether one lives in a "red" or "blue" state, the data suggests.
The ten states with the widest gap were: Idaho (83.33%), Florida (77.19%), Utah (69.06%), Tennessee (66.15%), Arizona (65.47%), New Hampshire (65.36%), Nevada (65.25%), Maine (62.26%), Rhode Island (61.73%), and Washington (60.51%).
Meanwhile, the ten with the narrowest were: Louisiana (6.62%), West Virginia (9.93%), North Dakota (13.15%), Mississippi (16.11%), Alaska (18.75%), Illinois (20.51%), Maryland (23.48%), Iowa (25.89%), California (27.22%), Hawaii (29.16%), and Delaware (29.46%).
The HUD did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation's request for comment.
HUD spending did not appear to affect it affordability either, per the report.
"Looking at the figures, prices have galloped ahead of incomes in every state in the union over the course of a decade," the spokesperson said. "Nearly a half a trillion dollars was spent trying to make housing more affordable and accessible, but an analysis demonstrates it had no meaningful relationship with the state-by-state affordability gap families are now facing."
The states that saw a high level of HUD spending on a per capita basis had figures up to $3,940, like Massachusetts. Many states were over $1,000 or over $2,000 per capita.
"What seems clear is this kind of massive top-down spending not only exacerbates inflationary pressures, it's not demonstrably efficient or effective. It doesn't seem to be helping Americans close that gap between growing prices and incomes," he said.
He told the DCNF that "a variety of other factors need to be considered" like local spending, regulation, and "more sensible federal budgeting."
"Shoveling money at the problem from far-away Washington does not hold a lot of hope … The further from the construction site, the less effective these decisions and investments are likely to be," he continued.
However, one thing that may have affected housing affordability is the COVID-19 pandemic.
"In a handful of states with, it's also true that they experience an influx of folks who were leaving big cities during the Covid crisis," the spokesperson said. "Idaho is a good example where home prices skyrocketed and people leaving states like California likely impacted that. But Idaho was also number one in the nation for income growth over that decade, which suggests that where people are moving, growth and opportunity are likely to follow in the future."
He also told the DCNF that an even more "staggering" finding is the time it'd take a household with a median income to save up for a down payment on an average home in their state.
"If we presume a 10% pre-tax savings rate, which is by no means easy for every American, it would take more than 9 years to save for a 20% down payment in Alaska. That's on the short end," the spokesperson said. "In Maine, you'd be looking at a quarter of a century. After reviewing the numbers, it gets a lot easier to see why younger generations may have concluded the dream is out of reach and even given the American Dream a Gen Z makeover."
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