The 20 U.S. metro areas where there are more jobs than housing

The American dream of owning a home is becoming even more unattainable. Currently, almost every city in the United States is experiencing some form of the housing crisis. However, some metropolitan areas are facing a bigger housing shortage than others. 

Recently, the data-driven media outlet Stacker released a report about metropolitan areas where the number of jobs outpaces the housing supply. Stacker worked with a real estate investment marketplace known as Roofstock. They used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ employment dataset. 

Roofstock and Stacker calculated the number of new jobs created between August 2020 and August 2021 and compared it to the number of new housing permits issued during the same period. The list features 20 areas with the highest job-to-housing permit ratio. Here they are:

#20. Champaign-Urbana, Illinois

#19. Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, Pennsylvania, New Jersey

#18. Rochester, New York

#17. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

#16. Elkhart-Goshen, Indiana

#15. Urban Honolulu, Hawaii

#14. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, California

#13. Erie, Pennsylvania

#12. New York-Newark-Jersey City, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania

#11. Lansing-East Lansing, Michigan

#10. Springfield, Illinois

#9. Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, California

#8. Duluth, Minnesota, Wisconsin

#7. Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, California

#6. Peoria, Illinois

#5. Lancaster, Pennsylvania

#4. Modesto, California

#3. Utica-Rome, New York

#2. St. Cloud, Minnesota

#1. Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, North Carolina

One of the estimates suggests that the United States needs to increase its housing supply by 3.8 million units to keep up with the demand from potential buyers. The calls to build more housing units reached the White House. Last week, the Biden administration unveiled the federal budget proposal requesting $50 billion in grants and loans to increase the housing supply. 

Overall, low housing inventory forces people who live in these metropolitan areas to compete for the small number of homes available on the market, which leads to bidding wars and even bigger affordability crisis, especially in busy cities like New York and Los Angeles. 

Resources:

“Metros where job growth is outpacing new housing supply,” by Angelica Leicht (Stacker, 2022)

“Metros where job growth is outpacing new housing supply,” by Angelica Leicht (Roofstock, 2022)

“Housing Supply: A Growing Deficit,” by Sam Khater, Len Kiefer, Venkataramana Yanamandra (Freddie Mac, 2021)

“The 20 metro areas in the U.S. facing the biggest housing shortages,” by Katherine Rodriguez (NJ.com, 2022)