Cleveland Housing Affordability

There are some good inter­ac­tive util­i­ties out there for deter­min­ing hous­ing afford­abil­i­ty based upon var­i­ous met­rics. The Cen­ter for Neigh­bor­hood Tech­nol­o­gy has a Hous­ing + Trans­porta­tion Afford­abil­i­ty Index and the New York Times has a cal­cu­la­tor that deter­mines whether it is bet­ter to rent or buy based upon selec­table cri­te­ria. There’s also WalkScore, which deter­mines the walk­a­bil­i­ty of your res­i­dence to basic needs. My place gets a 68/100.

Before the hous­ing dis­as­ter­ba­cle here in Cleve­land, afford­abil­i­ty based upon the NYT cal­cu­la­tor would have been giv­ing me returns on home-own­er­ship after 3 years. Who knows how that’s changed. The Hous­ing and Trans­porta­tion visu­al for Cleve­land basi­cal­ly fit what I expect­ed. The poor­er areas with low­er prop­er­ty tax­es fit the cri­te­ria for afford­abil­i­ty, while the nicer areas [out­er rings, non-Cleve­land-incor­po­rat­ed] are over the sug­gest­ed bench­mark. Of course, the map just pro­vides basic data, there isn’t much inter­pre­ta­tion going on in terms of sta­tis­ti­cal com­par­isons of oth­er data asso­ci­at­ed with our area. The advanced menu is a bit more infor­ma­tive.