Affordability & Cost of Living: Start Here
A guided introduction to housing, wages, household costs and the measures used to compare affordability.
Start with housing because it is a major household expense, then broaden the analysis to wages, prices, hours of work and budget shares. The sequence shows why affordability is a relationship between resources and costs—not simply a list of prices.
Explore This Learning Path
Move through these visuals in sequence to build your understanding of the issue.
How to Use This Learning Path
Move through the visuals in order for the clearest introduction, or open any step that interests you. Each visual includes its explanation, sources, and related context.
Start with housing versus income
Over the common 2015–2024 period, WP016 reports real Ohio house prices rose about 41% while real median household income rose about 17%.
Understand the home-price-to-income ratio
WP016 reports Ohio's median home-price-to-income ratio reached 2.6 in the most recent OHFA data, the highest since 2005.
Define affordability relative to wages
WP020 defines its Affordability Index as a category price index divided by an average-hourly-earnings index, with January 2000 set to 100.
See why hours of work matter
WP020 supplements price indexes with hours-of-work measures where defensible actual-dollar price series exist.
See how budget pressure differs by income
WP020 reports a 12.3 percentage-point gap between the lowest- and highest-income fifths in the share of their own budgets devoted to housing in 2024.
Connect healthcare to household affordability
WP020 reports Ohio employer-sponsored family premiums required 568.1 hours of an Ohio worker's pay in 2008 and 744.1 hours in 2025.
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