The worst counties in U.S. for buying houses

By Patrick Jones, Buzz60

The American dream is a spouse, kids, a dog and a house with a white picket fence. Of course, as far as housing goes, it's little tougher to achieve that part of the American dream in some areas when compared to others. I'm not talking just about housing prices, but housing prices in an area when compared to income in that same area.

So there's a new chart created by Robert Chase of Overflow Data Solutions, Business Insider reports, and it combines median income and median values of homes in each US county. The results show the toughest housing markets, in terms of least affordable housing when taking average income into consideration, from sea to shining sea.

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There are the obvious ones in the more expensive cities like New York and San Francisco. Then the data also found some counties you wouldn't expect. For example, places like San Juan County, Washington; Dukes County, Massachusetts; Nantucket County, Massachusetts; San Miguel County, Colorado; Pitikin County, Colorado; and Teton County, Wyoming, where the average house value is $689,000 and the average income is $75,000.

On the bright side, Forbes listed the best city to invest in housing as Grand Rapids, Michigan–but who knows, right? These things all seem to change so fast.