A lot has been made in recent weeks about housing affordability in the City of Atlanta. The mayor has made affordable housing one of her signature issues and media coverage of high rents and fancy townhomes is frequent. According to a new study however, relative to the rest of the country, Atlanta is still doing pretty good.
Financial website WalletHub has come out with a study ranking cities for first-time home buyers and the City of Atlanta is ranked third among big cities, surpassed only by Tampa and Colorado Springs. Tampa was actually tops overall in the study, beating out Overland Park, Kansas; Thornton, Colorado; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Boise, Idaho in the top five.
Three hundred cities were ranked according to three categories, affordability, real-estate market and quality of life. Within these categories were a number of factors to determine the individual category scores, including cost of living, tax rates, foreclosure rates, recreation-friendliness, weather and job market.
Atlanta performed about average for affordability, ranking 103rd, and similarly scored 118th for quality of life. The high ranking resulted from Atlanta scoring 10th in the real estate market category. Most cities in the top rankings saw at least one category fall down into the hundreds.
Higher affordability means quality of life might not be as good – like in Peoria, Arizona, with a 13th ranking in affordability and 5th in real-estate market, but a 223rd in quality of life. Peoria, Arizona was ranked 7th overall. The top city Tampa had high rankings in real-estate market and quality of life but was only 147th in affordability.
Other Georgia cities were also included on the list. Roswell came in 31st overall, with 88th best in affordability, 21st in real-estate market, but 151st in quality of life. Many residents of the big city north of the river would probably disagree with that quality of life ranking. Columbus was ranked 67th overall, a top third ranking, and was actually 5th in affordability. Quality of life in Columbus was ranked quite low however, at 262nd. Savannah also made the top 100, coming in at 91st. Sandy Springs, Athens and Augusta were all ranked in the middle tier.
The study echoes a trend of recent good economic news for Atlanta and shows continued growth likely on the horizon. The last time InsiderAdvantage reported on a study from WalletHub was one that showed Atlanta was the third best city to start a career. Combined with this latest news about home-buying, Atlanta continues to be one of the top spots in the country for young people to find employment and build both a career and a life.
If you are at all interested in residential real estate, the study is worth a read. There is some great trivia to be found. The lowest cost of living is in Laredo, Texas. The highest cost of living? It’s a tie. Sunnyvale, California, home of nearly 10,000 Google employees, and San Francisco, home of many other employees in Silicon Valley.
