I'm sure a nurse, teacher, police officer, etc.. can not afford a home because I make more than double what they do and I can not afford a home by conventional standards. Home prices are not sustainable.

According to the center's calculations, two teachers or two police officers -- or someone making double what a teacher or police officer make -- can afford the median-priced home in the metro area. But their salary figures are medians, too, so it's not based off starting wages.

Kevin- While nobody can predict the future of housing, the reality probably is that home prices will not go down enough for things to change much as far as affordability. The majority of seller's out there, that can afford their payments are not going to go out and give away their equity by selling cheap or take a lose.

you also do not take into account student loans that most young proffessionals such as nurses must repay or the cost of a child. Housing prices in this area have gotten out of control, this is not new york city.

Anonymus - homeowners are surely not going to give away their equity, as long as they have the choice.

For any homeowner like myself who bought in 2006, there won't be a choice about losing equity. In my neigborhood, prices have dropped 5-10% since then. I'm putting my house up shortly and will list for $10k less then what I paid for it. If I thought waiting a year or two would help, I would, but all indications are prices will keep going down. So, we'll just have to take our loss and move on. I don't think people realize how bad things are and that anyone who bought from 2005 on and wants to sell in the next few years will have to sell at a loss...

Anon, I think what you might not be taking into consideration is that many of the people who own homes are not "home owners" but rather speculators. Also, many people who bought home in the past few years really should have never been approved for a loan because they don't have the credit worthiness to pay it back. Those two groups combined with your standing job relocations, family growth/declines, divorces, sickness, job layoffs, etc... will cause prices to revert to the historical averages. Think of the consequences if home prices do not revert to historical averages. How will Maryland or any other inflated city attract new work forces? Regardless of how good the job market is here (at least for now), if you can not afford to live here, you probably will eventually move away. If a police officer or nurse can make $50K here or $50K in Charlotte, NC and it costs them 50% more to live here, at lot of the work forece will move to Charlotte. This then creates a problem for local services since crime increase due to a flight of polices officers, school get worse because teachers can't make enough money here to live here, hospitals are short staffed as well. If I were a police officer, I wouldn't work in Maryland...very bad politics for the police dept., low pay and affordability, high murder rate and risk as an officer, bad place to raise a family. The only places an officer can afford to live in the ghettos in which they police. Rapidly rising house prices are not good for our economy. People quickly forget what happened to our manufacturing industry once we couldn't stay price competitive with foreign imports. People will migrate to lower cost of living locals. It wont happen over night, but I'm sure the rising local taxes, loss of liberties here (speed camera, no smoking in bars, etc..) will also help this flight. A few decades ago we had "white flight"...the next decade will be marked by "affordability flight".

Maybe I'm severely misunderstanding the statistic, but if "the typical family in the Baltimore metro area could afford fewer than half of the homes sold last summer", doesn't that sound about right? Shouldn't the "typical" homeowner be an "average" or "median" homeowner? In which case, wouldn't you expect that about half the people are above and half below? Which means that half the houses are (more or less) affordable and half the house are (more or less) unaffordable? We hear a lot about the "median" sales price and the "average" sales price, but considering that these statistics can be severely skewed by high priced sales, I think we need a new metric for understanding home prices. It's very possible for prices to be rising on lower priced homes and falling on higher prices homes but for the statistics to only show a drop in prices (not that this is actually happening, but I'm betting houses under $300k are holding their value a lot more than houses over $400k). Any math majors out there have a way to tease out anomolies like this in home prices?

Hi, Mitch -- what I found interesting about that stat is that it was around 70 percent in 2000, which meant the typical family had a wide variety of homes in their price range. It also meant that families or singles earning less than the median didn't have as much competition for the lower-priced homes.