Want to own in Santa Monica? Get in line and bring your next 15 years of pretax pay. Head out to Ridgecrest in the high desert, and you are looking at less than three years of income for a typical household. That stark split comes from a new affordability ranking that lays out, in unforgiving numbers, where homeownership in California is a real prospect and where it is closer to a fantasy.
How The Times Measured Affordability
According to the Los Angeles Times, the paper sorted California cities by how many years of a typical household's income it would take to buy the median home, using 2024 Census Bureau data and counting only places with at least 20,000 residents. By that math, Ridgecrest in eastern Kern County landed at the top of the most affordable list, with a median home value around $253,900 and a 2.84-years-of-income price tag. Santa Monica, with a median home value near $1.76 million, came in as the least affordable, at 15.28 years of income.
The pattern on the list will not shock anyone who has looked at California real estate lately: Central Valley and Mojave Desert communities dominate the bargain end, while coastal cities and Silicon Valley suburbs cluster at the expensive extreme.
“In the Central Valley, it’s just much easier to build than anywhere else in California,” Richard Green, director and chair of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, told the Los Angeles Times. He cited a combination of more available land, a different regulatory environment and markets built largely around single-family homes as reasons supply can grow faster and keep prices lower. Those factors can make places look very affordable on paper, even if they sit far from the biggest job centers.
Census Numbers Behind The List
The underlying price figures the Times leaned on show up in public Census data. Census Reporter lists Ridgecrest's median home value at about $253,900, while Census Reporter puts Santa Monica's around $1.76 million. The Times matched those city-level medians with median household incomes, then divided price by income to get the years-of-income ratio that drives the ranking.
Laid out on a map, that simple bit of arithmetic goes a long way toward explaining the sharp coastal-versus-inland divides that jump off the page: relatively modest inland prices against local paychecks on one side, extremely high coastal prices stacked on the other.
What This Means For Buyers
California's extremes sit inside a broader national squeeze. A countrywide price-to-income measure climbed to about 5.1 times income in 2024, one of the highest readings in recent decades, meaning home prices have been rising faster than earnings overall, according to the Housing Almanac. The mismatch is most severe on the coasts, where higher wages and long-time owners with plenty of equity cushion some of the pain but still leave a lot of would-be buyers locked out.
For anyone actually house-hunting, the trade-offs are familiar: cheaper homes with longer commutes and fewer amenities, or eye-watering prices in job-rich, ocean-adjacent neighborhoods. One practical move is to run the same quick calculation the Times used for any city on your list: take the local median home price, divide it by the local median household income and see how many years of pay you would be effectively tying up. Then keep an eye on building-permit activity and mortgage-rate changes, since those two levers are likely to shape near-term affordability in your target markets.
