Commentary

In this paper, the authors update the affordability debate using data from the 1990s. They follow Gyourko and Linneman (1993) in addressing the affordability issue by asking a simple question: Is a home of a given quality from ten or twenty years ago more or less affordable today to a household similarly situated to the type of household that occupied the home a decade or two ago? It is important to determine whether the prolonged economic expansion of the 1990s has significantly improved affordability for households at the bottom of the income distribution. Real house prices at the lower end of the price distribution fell during the 1990s. However, the authors' concept of affordability also hinges on the trends in constant-quality house prices for which, heretofore, there have not been estimates for the current expansion