U.S. Housing Affordability (1993–2024)

STAT 184 · Section 4 Course Project

Authors: Paige · Tessa · Kunal · Sam

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Overview

This project analyzes how U.S. housing costs have evolved over 31 years relative to household incomes and general inflation, using four datasets downloaded directly from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) as CSV files.

Repository Structure

.
├── script
    ├── ....R                     # Generation of data visualizations
├── report.qmd                    # Full R Markdown report (knit → report.html)
├── data/
│   ├── MSPUS.csv                 # Median home sales price (quarterly)
│   ├── CUUR0000SEHA.csv          # CPI rent index (monthly)
│   ├── MEHOINUSA646N.csv         # Median household income (annual)
│   ├── CPIAUCSL.csv              # CPI-U all items (monthly)
│   └── housing_metrics_master.csv  # Generated master dataset
└── plots/
    ├── 01_median_home_price.png
    ├── 02_median_rent.png
    ├── 03_price_to_rent.png
    ├── 04_income_nominal_real.png
    ├── 05_income_growth_yoy.png
    ├── 06_cpi_inflation.png
    ├── 07_price_to_income.png
    ├── 08_all_indexed.png
    └── ...

Data Sources (FRED)

File	Series	Description
MSPUS.csv	MSPUS	Median Sales Price of Houses Sold
CUUR0000SEHA.csv	CUUR0000SEHA	CPI: Rent of Primary Residence
MEHOINUSA646N.csv	MEHOINUSA646N	Median Household Income
CPIAUCSL.csv	CPIAUCSL	CPI-U All Items

Downloaded from: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.csv?id=<SERIES_ID>

How to Run

Install packages (once)

install.packages(c("readr","dplyr","tidyr","lubridate",
                   "ggplot2","scales","patchwork","rmarkdown","knitr"))

Generate plots

source("/script/analysis.R")   # writes plots/ and data/housing_metrics_master.csv
source("/script/...")

Compile full report

rmarkdown::render("report.Rmd", output_file = "report.html")
# or: click Knit in RStudio

Key Findings

Metric	1993	2024	Change
Median home price	$151K	$477K	+217%
Estimated monthly rent	$455	$1,876	+312%
Nominal household income	$31,241	$80,610	+158%
Real household income (2024$)	$67,836	$80,610	+19%
Price-to-income ratio	4.83×	5.92×	—
Peak inflation	—	7.96% (2022)	—

Authors

All authors are accessible from the GitHub repository's contributors. Their contact links can be found on their profiles.