White Collar Professionals Can't Afford Homes in Portland

A major gauge of affordability and a realistic way to look at home values is to see if middle class, white collar, professional people can afford to by homes in the city on their salary. For Portland, the answer is no. The Center for Housing Policy released an in depth study on affordability around the nation, explore and read more here. Based on the graph above it It is easy to see that teachers, nurses and police officers cannot qualify for an average home in Portland on one income. With 2 of the fields dominated by women, this puts a major cramp on one of the largest groups of home buyers- single professional women.  It is also easy to see that if you do not have a white collar job, such as janitorial work, there is basically no way that you can buy an average home, let alone as the sole breadwinner for a family. The drop in prices over the last few years has been seen as a crushing blow to the middle class, but I think it was necessary to make homes actually affordable for middle class families. If prices had kept going up, then families with 2 incomes in white collar positions wouldn't even be able to buy a nice home.