Blog: Affordable Housing

Remember the distorted US maps adjusted so each state or county is the size of its population? Doing it by real estate prices would be even more skewed.

Of the 150 top ZIP codes by median home purchase price in 2005, 60 are in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, or New Jersey, and 77 are in California. The entire rest of the country - Pennsylvania, the South, the Midwest, Southwest and Northwest - all of it gets only 13 spots in this list, and no more than two in any state: two each in Maryland, Florida, Illinois, and Washington, and one each in Virginia, South Carolina, and Arizona. That's it.

You can buy a whole town in British Columbia for the same price as many single Manhattan brownstones.