Where a home of their own is an elusive dream

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile • E-mail

MOUNTLAKE TERRACE, Wash. - It’s no mystery to Dale and Darby Brennan why they have not realized their vision of the middle-class dream, despite seeing their income double to $70,000 in the past four years.

Like most middle-class American families, the Brennans’ vision includes owning a home. They’d like to buy in the Seattle suburbs, where they both grew up and where they now work and live in a rented house with daughters Olivia, 3, and Alicia, 2. But Western Washington, the Seattle area in particular, is one of the most expensive housing markets in the nation.

While simple geography may exaggerate the Brennans’ problem, it’s an issue faced by a growing number of young Americans. Housing affordability data, which links median home prices to median incomes, indicate they could become the first generation of the middle class to experience a serious decline in the rate of home ownership.

“We are doing all the right things with our money and I feel like the dream of owning a home is still so out of reach for us,” says Darby. “I don’t want a handout. I just feel like our middle-class income should be enough and it’s not.”

That income — from Darby’s job in technical support with a large electronics manufacturer and Dale’s position as a manager in a local produce business — is 8 percent below the median family income of $75,600 in their area, but 18 percent above the national figure of $59,400.

But the cost of a home where they live is nearly double the national median of $224,000. The Brennans’ street is the boundary between King County, where the median home price is $440,000, and Snohomish County, where it is $370,000. Even with a fat down payment in either county, which they don’t have, the Brennans wouldn’t qualify for a conventional mortgage on a median-priced home.

They aren’t alone. While the nationwide home ownership rate has remained near its record high of 69 percent for much of this decade, that could be changing. Despite sending two parents into the workforce to boost family earnings to record levels, even in inflation-adjusted dollars, the opportunity to buy a home is slipping beyond the grasp of many middle-class Americans.

The National Association of Realtors tracks the situation in its monthly Housing Affordability Index. Nationwide, the realtors group says, the ability of the average American family to buy the average home has fallen dramatically since 2004, when its index stood at 124. That number means that a family earning the median income made enough to afford 124 percent of the payment on an 80-percent mortgage on a median-priced home.

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