A Long-Run Years-to-Own Atlas of US Counties, 1969–2024

Abstract

We construct a county-level panel of housing affordability — the ratio of median home value to median household income — across the United States from 1969 to 2024. Drawing from the Bureau of Economic Analysis's Regional Economic Accounts for per-capita income, the Census Bureau's Decennial and American Community Surveys for housing values, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency's Housing Price Index for inter-census trajectories, we produce annual years-to-own estimates for all 3,121 US counties. We find that the national median years-to-own has risen from 1.8 in 1970 to 4.1 in 2024, but that the dispersion across counties has widened from a 5-to-1 range to a 35-to-1 range in the same period. We document the geographic and temporal structure of this divergence and identify three distinct affordability-trajectory regimes among US counties.

Findings

• Years-to-own at the national median has risen from 1.8 (1970) to 4.1 (2024), a 2.3-fold increase.
• The cross-county range has widened from 5-to-1 (1.0 to 5.2) to 35-to-1 (0.6 to 23.8) over the same period.
• Three distinct trajectory regimes are identifiable: stable-affordable (Midwest, Plains; ~40% of counties), steadily appreciating (most of the South, Mountain West interior; ~45% of counties), and diverged-luxury (coastal CA, NY/CT metros, ski-resort enclaves; ~15% of counties).
• The diverged-luxury cohort accelerated its divergence after 2000. Pre-2000 there were ~80 counties with years-to-own > 8; today there are 612.
• The income-to-home-value relationship is no longer log-linear: at the high end, home values rise faster than incomes do, even controlling for local AGI growth.

Method

We compute years-to-own as the ratio of median home value to median household income at the county level. Source data:

• Per-capita personal income from BEA Regional Economic Accounts (Table CA1), annual, 1969–2024.
• Median household income from Census ACS 5-Year, 2014–2023 (and Decennial Census, 1970/1980/1990/2000).
• Median home value from Census ACS 5-Year and Decennial; FHFA HPI used to interpolate annual values between Census releases.

To produce a household-level income series back to 1969, we convert BEA per-capita income to household income using the year-specific average household size from the Census. Methodology details and validation against the IPUMS USA 1% microdata sample are in the appendix.

All county-level years-to-own values, the SQL that produces them, and the full replication package (including alternative specifications using PUMS microdata and FHFA-only home-value series) are available at github.com/totib/commerce-institute/tree/main/papers/001.

Replication

Replication SQL and Python are on GitHub at github.com/totib/commerce-institute/tree/main/papers/001. The dataset version pinned to this paper is at /data/years-to-own/2026-05/.

Cite

Swanson, S.. (2026). A Long-Run Years-to-Own Atlas of US Counties, 1969–2024. Commerce Institute Working Paper No. 001.