It's labor day weekend, but you might not be spending it at the beach if you're trying to buy a home in Miami.
With an average weekly wage of $893, it takes about 13.1 years for Miamians to save enough money for a down payment, according to The Atlantic.
Using the median local asking price per square foot and wage figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistic's quarterly census, Trulia economist Jed Kolko calculated the number assuming Miamians set aside 10 percent of their pre-tax earnings, added interest savings, and offer a 20 percent down payment.
Of course, Miami is a city with extreme income disparity, so many locals won't be buying homes for even longer than that -- assuming they're even able to start saving now. But the Magic City metro is still not as badly off as Long Island and San Diego (14.6 years), San Francisco (20.6 years), or Honolulu, where housing affordability isn't: it takes a whopping 28.7 years to save for a down payment on Oahu, where the average weekly wage is $851.
In fact, Miami didn't even make the Atlantic's top 10 metros with the least affordable housing (see the list here), but that doesn't mean we don't have problems getting hard-working people into homes. Even when the mortgage is affordable, many buyers in weather-risky Miami are finding that rising rates at state-run Citizens Property Insurance Corp. make home-buying impossible.
“If I didn’t have friends who had warned me about the high cost of insurance, I would have been shell-shocked,” Justin Leto, who was able to close on a house in Coconut Grove in June but still frets about the $11,000 premium, told the Miami Herald. “For a lot of people, this is going to make it impossible to buy a home.”