Study tried to find least affordable cities in U.S. The results aren’t kind to Bellingham

Bellingham housing prices have been on the rise recently, and a new study says that the local job market hasn’t caught up.

Construction business resource site Construction Coverage looked at Zillow housing price data to determine the median home price in 380 U.S. cities. It compared those numbers to local median income data, taken from U.S. Census Bureau data, to determine how expensive housing is in each city relative to what its residents can afford.

It calculated what was essentially a housing affordability score for each city, taking the ratio of the median home price to median income ratio. That way, areas where housing prices are high but residents can afford those steep prices aren’t mischaracterized as unaffordable.

The study listed Bellingham’s median home price at $626,137, up 48.9% from five years earlier. The median household income was $64,748, giving it a price to income ratio of 9.7, over twice the national average of 4.7.

That was the highest ratio of any city in Washington by nearly a full point. Bellevue was the closest, with an 8.9 home price to income ratio, followed by Redmond, Renton and Everett.

Bellingham’s affordability score was the 31st worst in the whole country. It was also the 18th highest among the 216 cities with a population under 350,000 that the report looked at.

But the results get much more concerning when you consider that 28 of the 30 cities with the least affordable housing in the country were in California. Of every city outside the Golden State, Bellingham had the third-least affordable housing prices, behind just New York City and Flagstaff, Arizona.

On a national level, the least affordable cities were Newport Beach, Palo Alto and Glendale, all in California.

Washington as a whole had the sixth highest home price to income ratio of any state at 6.3, behind Hawaii, California, Montana, Oregon and Massachusetts.