Real Estate Vulnerability Index

Forbes teamed with Economy.com to analyze housing affordability in these desperate bubble times in which we live. Their findings:

While it has become much more difficult to buy the median house with the median income in many cities, in others it has actually become easier, pointing to a boom taking place in pockets, rather than the nation as a whole.

Real estate is a local phenomenon...check.
Five of our 12 cities had affordability indexes below 100: San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Boston.

In Dallas, the median income can get you more than 200% of the median home. In Los Angeles, you can still get only 57%. In Philadelphia, the median home price more than tripled between 1980 and 2004, rising 220% from $57,570 to $184,190, which would suggest that houses would be harder to afford. But incomes rose, too, albeit not as dramatically, increasing 195% from just under $19,000 to more than $56,000.

http://www.forbes.com/realestate/2005/06/03/cx_sc_0603home.html