[Music] as part of our week-long series real estate the new reality we're taking a look at inequality and housing availability a study out from the National Association of Realtors shows that middle-income buyers are experiencing the largest affordable home shortage in 2023. here to explain is Yahoo finance housing reporter Rebecca Chen Rebecca let's break this down so we are seeing a huge housing shortage in the nation right now but this data has shown us that middle-income families are seeing the pain the most so there are about 51 percent of families in the U.S that are making 75 000 or less but there are only 23 percent of house things that are affordable and available to these families what that means is if two of these households within this income bracket goes house hunting one or more than one of them will come out empty-handed or they're forced by something that's more expensive and that's out of their budget so in addition addition to what we're seeing for that we're also seeing that this inequality has really been worse in the last five years so in 2018 there was still about 50 percent of housing available to middle-income families but today in 2023 that number shaped up by more than half to just 23 wow so what's caused the imbalance in the market and a shift in housing inequality here so there's really a couple major reasons so we can start from the supply side we have really been under building houses in this market since the Great Recession for the last decade but what is being built right now is not really what is needed meaning that a lot of developers they focus on the higher end luxury product because that's what makes sense for them profit-wise and profit for the profit margin and on side of the demand there is on top of family formation that has happened in the last couple of years The Great Migration is also causing an issue what that means is families that are moving from these more expensive cities to the lower cost places they're really driving up prices in the traditionally more affordable places but what it hasn't done is it hasn't really lowered prices enough in expensive cities so it's really causing this a shift overall in prices across the nation and what we are also seeing is of course borrowing costs has really gone up a lot so a house that used to be affordable for the family may not be affordable anymore just because interest rate is so high today Rebecca Chen excellent breakdown there thanks so much for bringing this report to us thank you absolutely
