* Redfin…

Americans need to earn $111,252 per year to afford the typical U.S. home for sale, down 4% from $115,870 a year ago.

The income needed to buy a home has been declining since November, providing some much-needed relief for U.S. homebuyers. Before that, the income needed to afford a home had been rising on a year-over-year basis nearly every month for five years straight, since the pandemic homebuying boom drove up home-sale prices. The income needed to buy a home peaked at over $122,000 this past June. […]

Zooming in on local regions, homebuying affordability is improving in 37 of the 50 most populous U.S. metro areas. Affordability has improved most in Dallas, Sacramento, CA and Jacksonville, FL. […]

On the flip side, homebuyers need to earn more than last year in some places where sale prices have increased. The biggest increase is in Detroit, where buyers must earn $74,912 to afford the typical home, up 3.6% year over year. It’s followed closely by Chicago ($105,440, up 3.5%) and St. Louis ($73,984, up 3%). Buffalo, NY and Cincinnati round out the top five.

* Crain’s explains what’s going on. It’s actually pretty simple stuff when you think about it…

“The reason Chicago was getting more expensive in 2025 is that it didn’t get too expensive during the pandemic,” said Daryl Fairweather, Redfin’s chief economist. “It’s been slow and steady growth,” contrasted with skyrocketing pandemic-era prices in places like Phoenix.

In early 2022, at the height of the housing boom, when Chicago’s home prices were up about 10% year-over-year, Phoenix’s price increase was triple that. Now Phoenix and other pandemic boom towns are giving back a lot of their increases.

A result is that Phoenix buyers’ affordability grew in 2025 by 3.7%, almost a mirror image of the shrinkage in Chicago. […]

Even though there’s a gap of nearly 11 percentage points between Dallas’s greatly improved affordability in the past year and Chicago’s lost affordability, it’s still cheaper to buy a house here

* Republican gubernatorial candidate Ted Dabrowski has been referred to as a “policy wonk” by one news outlet and as a “policy guru” by another. The wonk/guru blames the real estate trend on undocumented residents. From a press release…

Few issues contribute to Illinois’ affordability problem more than high housing costs, and nobody bears more direct responsibility for those costs than Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

The reason isn’t complicated. The 550,000 illegal immigrants (per Pew Research) in Illinois have supercharged demand for affordable housing, making prices and rents soar for everyday Illinoisans.

Gov. Pritzker is responsible for attracting many of those illegal immigrants. His sanctuary policies, generous benefit programs and a host of other policies that formed his “Welcome with Dignity” initiative made Illinois a magnet for migrants during the Biden administration’s years of open borders.

* While they do marginally drive up prices for rental units, the real cause is something else…

Similar to Kashkari’s remarks, an October 2024 article by the Joint Center for Housing Studies said that the low interest rates during the pandemic “motivated a spike in housing demand among those wanting to take advantage of the lower rates and the greater purchasing power they provided. The heightened demand from these factors quickly clashed with the country’s constrained housing supply, which remained at insufficient levels after years of underproduction following the Great Recession. These forces combined to put enormous pressure on home prices as well as rents, as the growing number of renter households competed for limited rental stock.”

The article, by the center’s senior research analyst, Riordan Frost, looked at the role of immigration in housing costs and found that “the recent surge in immigration … does not line up with the high growth in both rents and home prices that happened at the start of the pandemic.” The largest increases in prices occurred in 2020 and 2021 before immigration rose in 2022 and 2023, Frost wrote, noting that the growth rate in prices slowed in those latter years.

* And, don’t forget, housing construction is reliant on immigrant workers. Without them, stuff doesn’t get built, which will drive up prices. The industry is having huge problems on the Texas border right now…

Immigration raids across Texas are raising concerns beyond border communities, as builders and business leaders warn the crackdown is hitting the economy and the housing market.

They argue fears surrounding heightened Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity are keeping workers away or forcing them to stay home, leaving some housing development projects sitting unfinished.

Last week, a group of South Texas builders brought their concerns to lawmakers in Washington, D.C., warning that immigration raids at construction sites would raise construction costs.

“A project that was taking maybe four to five months on an average, starter-type home is now taking eight, nine, 10 months, just because of the delays,” said Efrain Gomez, treasurer of the South Texas Builders Association. “It’s a huge ripple effect.”

* Dabrowski’s release goes on to make a few good points about how our housing stock is inadequate. But, as “proof” for his illegal immigrant theory, he points to an LA Times piece about rents decreasing in that city. Except, there are lots of other factors mentioned in that story, including these…

Experts disagree on the extent of the drop; some say it’s a sign of things to come, while others suggest it’s merely a brief price plateau and rents will rise again in 2026. After all, the winter rental market is typically slower than the summer market, and the recent low is just 4.2% less than the all-time high of $2,262 in August 2022. […]

Although L.A. has generally lagged in housing construction compared with cities such as San Diego, 2025 was a big year for new apartments hitting the market, despite several hundred multifamily buildings burning in the Palisades and Eaton fires. In 2025, 15,095 multifamily units were completed in L.A., according to CoStar. That’s an 18% increase year over year and the second-highest total in the last decade.