St Louis' Secret to Affordable Housing: Abundant Land and Relatively Low Demand

St. Louis, Missouri has been one of the country's most affordable places to buy a home for over 134 years, according to new research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

The study found that inflation-adjusted house prices in St. Louis rose just six percent between 1890 and 2024, while average US home prices climbed 354 percent during the same period.

Cities like San Diego and Los Angeles saw their housing prices increase by more than 1,000 percent over the same period, while Boston experienced a nearly 500 percent gain. Cleveland, another Midwestern city, saw an inflation-adjusted increase of around 18 percent.

The researchers spent nearly a decade manually collecting 2.7 million real-estate listings published in newspapers dating back to 1890, allowing them to build one of the longest historical records of US housing prices ever assembled.