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Ogden-Clearfield area most affordable metro in Utah
August 24, 2007

The area encompassing Ogden-Clearfield was the most affordable metropolitan area in Utah in the second quarter, says a new report by the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo. Released Tuesday, the Housing Opportunity Index (HOI) shows Salt Lake City was the second-most affordable metropolitan area in Utah while Provo-Orem and St. George came in as the least affordable. The Logan metropolitan statistical area was not included in the NAHB/Wells Fargo report.

The HOI measures the share of homes in a given area that would have been affordable to a family earning the local median income based on standard mortgage underwriting criteria. In Ogden-Clearfield, the latest HOI indicates that 49.2 percent of new and existing homes that were sold in the area were affordable to families earning the median income. In Salt Lake, 31.7 percent of the homes were affordable while only 27.1 and 20.3 were affordable in Provo-Orem and St. George respectively.

Nationally, Kokomo, Ind., was the most affordable metro area in the U.S., with a share of 90.9 percent of homes affordable to those earning the local median income. At the bottom of the scale was Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, Calif., where only 3 percent of the homes sold in the second quarter were affordable to families earning the metro’s median household income.

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