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Real Estate

Stefan Weisman and his partner, Sean Mills, each have a rent-stabilized apartment in New York. Together they bought a house in Big Indian, N.Y., in the Catskills.

By MICHELLE HIGGINS

September 11, 2015

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WASHINGTON –  Say this about New York: If you can afford a first home there, you can probably afford one anywhere.

The same is true for San Francisco and, to a lesser extent, other hot job markets around the country for America’s millennial adults, who range in age from roughly 18 to 34. The challenge is that few millennials earn enough money to buy a home in these locales.

Prices have climbed to increasingly unaffordable levels while incomes have remained relatively flat. A result is that younger adults are renting for longer periods before buying their first home. A new analysis by the real estate firm Zillow found that the typical income for a first-time buyer is $54,340, pretty much the same as it was in the late 1970s after adjusting for inflation.

Over the same period, the median home price for this group, after inflation, has surged 42 percent to $140,328. The problem is that your situation can vary widely depending on where you live.

The median 33-year-old who is buying a first home spends 2.6 times his or her income on the property. Yet that looks like a relative bargain compared with New York, San Francisco and several other leading job markets. Zillow found that the price-to-income ratio is high for practically everyone in those metro areas, meaning that many have no choice but to keep renting.

Here are the metro areas where jobs are relatively plentiful but median home values significantly exceed incomes:

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Tanya Taylor at Bergdorf Goodman’s “Names To Know” event on Wednesday. Photo: Andrew Toth/Getty Images for Bergdorf Goodman

After four seasons of runway shows, designer Tanya Taylor is returning to a presentation format to showcase her spring 2016 collection. I visited Taylor at her Soho studio last week to talk about her design inspirations and prepping for Friday’s noon presentation, which she says is closer to an art installation (more on that later).

Hosting a runway show comes with a certain amount of prestige, but Taylor says she felt disconnected from those in the audience, and that the experience didn’t stand out enough in the busy New York Fashion Week schedule. “When people go to huge-budget shows, it’s so hard as a small designer to give them the same storytelling opportunity as runway,” she says. “Someone we had breakfast with recently said, ‘I’d rather spend five minutes hearing from you what it looks like then waiting five minutes for a show to start.'”

The well-spoken designer’s profile has risen considerably as of late — she was a 2014 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist and this year’s North American Woolmark Prize winner. Her brand is commercially thriving, too, with wholesale revenue up 300 percent in the last year. An e-commerce site launched in August.

“I just want to tell [editors] why this fabric is this or why this color happened, and you don’t get a chance to do that outside of them coming to a show because everyone is so busy,” she adds. “We wanted something that wakes people up and makes them really excited to spend a little time at the show and understand and talk to people.”

That jolt of energy won’t just be evident in Taylor’s signature bright colors and prints. The designer has partnered Minneapolis-based installation artist Eric Rieger, aka Hot Tea, whose work is designed to “disrupt public spaces with positivity through yarn,” in Taylor’s words. He has cut and hung miles of colorful yarn on the Williamsburg Bridge and other landmarks across the country. 

Taylor discovered Rieger on Instagram and direct-messaged him. He’s building his biggest installation yet for her — 47 feet by 47 feet — that will hang from the ceiling of the Swiss Institute. “He prefers that people don’t touch the yarns, just so that there’s a nice tension between the viewer and the art,” says Taylor.

The colorful yarn installation is a fitting environment for the collection. Inspired by a trip Taylor took to Kenya, Tanzania and Morocco in May, garments feature flowers, clean stripes and geometric patterns throughout. On the season’s mood board in her office, she points out a picture of brightly dyed yarn bundles suspended in air that she saw in a market in Marrakesh. “There’s something about [Hot Tea’s installation] that felt like, one, I would be obsessed to be in a room with the yarns and that much color. But it also totally went back to what it felt like being in these markets with this texture and color hanging above you.” Taylor also has a picture of her tour guide at the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya, who wore a wrapped blanket with a big single flower drawn on it that she recreated. “We always do flowers and florals, [but we’ve] never done something that large scale,” she says.

Pushing her own boundaries with fabrics is a priority for Taylor, who worked with silk twill and printed on silk cotton for the first time this season. She was most excited about a laser-cut and embroidered floral pattern on many fabrics, especially on denim — another first for her. Taylor is also starting to work with Swarovski crystals, having been inducted into the 2016 Swarovski Collective in August. “We don’t usually use crystal but it was almost a way to enhance prints and add more texture,” she says.

As one would expect, Taylor’s schedule for the week leading up to her presentation is packed. On Friday and Saturday she and casting director Noah Shelley met about 200 models, narrowing her final selection to 25. Taylor says she looks for happy, healthy, wide-eyed models with a friendly personality. “We keep their hair natural, their makeup very natural and it makes them feel like they are walking down the street wearing the collection.” She cited Kid Plotnikova, who appeared in the resort 2016 lookbook, and Cris Herrmann as some of her favorites. 

Meanwhile, Taylor tackled the presentation’s soundtrack with DJ Paul Devro, a producer for Diplo who has worked on her last three shows. She sends him some notes about the collection and he responds with a playlist that she edits.

After casting comes styling, which Taylor tackled the Sunday before the show with her team. Typically, they come up with 70 combinations of looks, post them on a board and edit them down. Taylor says it’s one of her favorite parts of the process. “It’s deciding, are we starting with super bold floral and going into whites and going into stripes? Or are we mixing it up?” she says. “You are creating new pieces that didn’t exist, new proportions are being found that are exciting and I love it.” Taylor makes sure to include looks to wear to weddings, work or on a date, as well as something for people who are shorter, taller, bigger busted or smaller busted. 

Next up are fittings, which Taylor said are the most stressful part of the process. “Sometimes you have to recut the entire dress or we won’t have enough fabric to do that, so we have to make it work,” she says. “And you’re almost at the final lap and it feels like the most pressure.” The models return to try on pieces during the day and a seamstress, a 65-year-old woman Taylor calls her “secret weapon,” takes them home at night for alterations.

Just three hours after the presentation on Friday, the collection will be at the 10 Eleven Showroom on Bryant Park for its first sales appointment with a buyer. Those appointments are Taylor’s biggest priority for the rest of fashion week. Then she heads to Paris for the CFDA’s “Americans in Paris” showcase for CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund alumni designers. “I like to go [to sales appointments] because I get a lot of great feedback,” says Taylor. “They’ll ask questions they won’t be able to ask a sales team, like where did this print come from or where do you see a girl wearing this dress?”

Taylor’s focus on the wearability of her collections while still pushing herself creatively sets her apart from other young designers. At the end of our conversation last week I asked her what effect, if any, did she want her presentations to have on her customers. “I think when people find an emotional way to attach themselves to any designer, any brand, they become more loyal for a longer time,” she says. “I feel like fashion designers should study psychology because that’s what you’re trying to do: figure out people’s preferences and anticipate them. We have people who will buy the same shape every single season. It’s like filling a hole in their life.”

Update: See the entire spring 2016 collection below. 

Homepage photo: Imaxtree

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A New York Police Department officer was stripped of his gun and badge as Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton issued swift apologies on Thursday for the rough arrest of James Blake, the retired tennis star, after he was misidentified as a suspect in a fraudulent credit card ring.

Criticism swirled over whether Mr. Blake had been mistreated because he was biracial. But it was Mr. Bratton’s acknowledgment that excessive force may have been used when an officer threw him to the ground that put a renewed national focus on the everyday arrest tactics long criticized by members of minority groups. The officers failed to report the mistaken arrest, as they were required to do, raising the possibility that it would not have come to light had Mr. Blake not spoken out.

The incongruity of a Harvard-educated professional athlete being manhandled by six white plainclothes officers on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan quickly became an embarrassment for the Police Department and a headache for Mr. de Blasio, exposing the kind of unprovoked aggression that he and elected leaders across the country have sought to stamp out.

The officer’s decision to throw an unarmed, compliant man to the ground added to the sense that black people are often roughed up by the police out of view, with few resources to bring attention to their grievances. In a sign of the shifting discourse on race and policing, Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Bratton moved with unusual speed to contact Mr. Blake to apologize. But the gestures also raised questions about whether they would have moved so swiftly if the encounter had not involved a well-known figure.

“This shouldn’t have happened and he shouldn’t have been treated that way,” Mr. de Blasio said in an interview on NY1 on Thursday, echoing remarks made earlier by Mr. Bratton.

By late Thursday, Mr. Bratton had conveyed his apology in a conversation with Mr. Blake, and Mr. de Blasio had exchanged text messages with Mr. Blake.

The actions of the officer, James Frascatore, were under review by internal affairs investigators and the Civilian Complaint Review Board. At least three force-related complaints, one of which was partially substantiated, were filed against Officer Frascatore, 38, with the review board in 2013, said a law enforcement official, who spoke anonymously because the police inquiry was continuing.

Video of the arrest reviewed by the authorities revealed how a botched sting operation had ensnared a sports celebrity, resulting in his being body-slammed to the sidewalk, according to his account, and handcuffed for 15 minutes on Wednesday afternoon.

The team of officers, looking for suspects in a credit card fraud ring, were relying on a courier who identified Mr. Blake as one of the buyers, the police said. The officers also had an Instagram photo of someone believed to be involved. That person, who Mr. Bratton said looked like Mr. Blake’s “twin brother,” turned out to have no role in the scheme.

Officer Frascatore then ran toward Mr. Blake and knocked him to the ground, raising concerns about “the inappropriateness of the amount of force that was used during the arrest,” Mr. Bratton said.

After releasing Mr. Blake, the officers did not fill out a “void arrest” form, leaving Mr. Bratton to learn what had happened from members of his public affairs staff, who told him about news reports about the episode.

Efforts to reach Officer Frascatore on Thursday night were unsuccessful. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association said in a statement that it had been “premature and unwarranted” to place him on desk duty.

Mr. Blake, 35, who retired from tennis two years ago, said the episode had drawn attention to the kind of rough arrest tactics that he believed were all too common in New York City.

“I do think most cops are doing a great job keeping us safe, but when you police with reckless abandon, you need to be held accountable,” Mr. Blake, whose mother is white and whose father was black, said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

The self-effacing tennis star, known on the tour for his speed and sportsmanship, was leaving the Grand Hyatt New York on East 42nd Street around noon on Wednesday to make an appearance for a corporate sponsor at the United States Open when Officer Frascatore, who was dressed in street clothes, barreled toward him.

“I was standing there doing nothing — not running, not resisting, in fact smiling,” Mr. Blake said, explaining that he thought the man might have been an old friend. Then, he said, the officer “picked me up and body slammed me and put me on the ground and told me to turn over and shut my mouth, and put the cuffs on me.”

A man who sells newspapers near the entrance to Grand Central Terminal said he watched the police rough up Mr. Blake. “They were real aggressive, like he robbed a bank,” the man, Charlie Sanders, 55, said. “They were shoving him around.”

Mr. Sanders said he saw the officers push Mr. Blake face-first into a large, mirrored building support beam near the Hyatt. With his head wrenched to the side and his hands cuffed behind him, Mr. Blake tried to talk.

“He told them, ‘I have my U.S. Open badge in my pocket,’ ” Mr. Sanders said.

Mr. Blake said Officer Frascatore did not explain why he was being detained. He counted himself lucky, he added, for not accidentally showing signs of resistance, and emerging with nothing more than cuts and bruises. He has retained Kevin Marino, a prominent New Jersey criminal defense lawyer.

“This happens too often,” Mr. Blake said, “and most of the time it’s not to someone like me.”

The bungled arrest arose out of an investigation into 16 fraudulent American Express credit card transactions, totaling about $18,000, that the police learned about on Monday from an Internet company that buys and delivers property for people in Manhattan. The police asked the company to let them supervise a delivery if the suspects made another purchase, said Robert K. Boyce, the chief of detectives, as they did the next day.

A delivery of high-end designer shoes was arranged for Wednesday, at the Hyatt’s concierge desk.

One of the buyers, a British man, James Short, 27, who was in New York on a student visa, met the courier and was immediately arrested. The courier then pointed to Mr. Blake from eight feet away, Chief Boyce said, identifying the tennis star as someone who had also bought items using false credit card information.

Officer Frascatore, a four-year veteran of the force, made a “fast approach,” Mr. Bratton said, grabbing Mr. Blake by the arm and taking him to the ground. Because he was working in street clothes, Officer Frascatore was not wearing a visible badge.

Mr. Blake was released when a retired police officer working as a security officer at the Hyatt told the officers they had detained a tennis star.

The officers found the second suspect they were seeking in the hotel and arrested him. Mr. Short and the second man, Jarmaine Grey, 26, were charged with grand larceny, identity theft and criminal possession of stolen property. At their arraignment late Thursday in Manhattan Criminal Court, both men were ordered held on $50,000 bond or cash with a 72-hour surety. They were also ordered to turn in their passports.

Mr. Blake told Mr. Bratton that he accepted the apology, but also made a firm request of the commissioner, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was continuing.

“He made the point that it is very much a bigger issue,” the person said. “That this is what happens every day and that this needs to be the start of a conversation about the ‘us and them’ attitude, how to deal with the policing in the communities where this occurs most frequently.”

Mr. Bratton, speaking at the news conference earlier in the day, was unequivocal in denying that race had played a role, saying, “I don’t believe at all that race was a factor.”

For Mr. Blake, a New York native who attended Harvard for two years before turning pro, the arrest was not the first time his race had thrown him into the spotlight. In 2001, he was locked in a fierce match at the U.S. Open when his opponent, Lleyton Hewitt, started arguing repeated foot-fault calls by one linesman.

“Look at him,” Mr. Hewitt shouted, pointing to the linesman, who was black. “Look at him,” Mr. Hewitt said again, pointing to Mr. Blake. “You tell me what the similarity is.”

Mr. Blake played down Mr. Hewitt’s remark at the time. He did the same on Thursday with regard to the suggestion that he had been racially profiled, though he told The Daily News a day earlier that “there’s probably a race factor involved.”

An active officer with more than 150 arrests, Officer Frascatore has received six citations for excellent police duty and meritorious service, the law enforcement official familiar with his work history said. The force-related complaint against him in 2013 that was partially substantiated was for failing to properly identify himself in a search situation.

A second law enforcement official, who also spoke anonymously because the investigation was continuing, said the inquiry was focused on two questions: what the officer was thinking when he rushed at Mr. Blake, and whether he used appropriate force, even if he believed Mr. Blake was the right person.

“A mistake is a mistake,” the law enforcement official said.

But, he added, “Part of the art of making a mistake like this is how you leave that mistake.” The official said it did not appear that Officer Frascatore ever explained things to Mr. Blake or apologized.

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A New York Police Department officer was stripped of his gun and badge as Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton issued swift apologies on Thursday for the rough arrest of James Blake, the retired tennis star, after he was misidentified as a suspect in a fraudulent credit card ring.

Criticism swirled over whether Mr. Blake had been mistreated because he was biracial. But it was Mr. Bratton’s acknowledgment that excessive force may have been used when an officer threw him to the ground that put a renewed national focus on the everyday arrest tactics long criticized by members of minority groups. The officers failed to report the mistaken arrest, as they were required to do, raising the possibility that it would not have come to light had Mr. Blake not spoken out.

The incongruity of a Harvard-educated professional athlete being manhandled by six white plainclothes officers on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan quickly became an embarrassment for the Police Department and a headache for Mr. de Blasio, exposing the kind of unprovoked aggression that he and elected leaders across the country have sought to stamp out.

The officer’s decision to throw an unarmed, compliant man to the ground added to the sense that black people are often roughed up by the police out of view, with few resources to bring attention to their grievances. In a sign of the shifting discourse on race and policing, Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Bratton moved with unusual speed to contact Mr. Blake to apologize. But the gestures also raised questions about whether they would have moved so swiftly if the encounter had not involved a well-known figure.

“This shouldn’t have happened and he shouldn’t have been treated that way,” Mr. de Blasio said in an interview on NY1 on Thursday, echoing remarks made earlier by Mr. Bratton.

By late Thursday, Mr. Bratton had conveyed his apology in a conversation with Mr. Blake, and Mr. de Blasio had exchanged text messages with Mr. Blake.

The actions of the officer, James Frascatore, were under review by internal affairs investigators and the Civilian Complaint Review Board. At least three force-related complaints, one of which was partially substantiated, were filed against Officer Frascatore, 38, with the review board in 2013, said a law enforcement official, who spoke anonymously because the police inquiry was continuing.

Video of the arrest reviewed by the authorities revealed how a botched sting operation had ensnared a sports celebrity, resulting in his being body-slammed to the sidewalk, according to his account, and handcuffed for 15 minutes on Wednesday afternoon.

The team of officers, looking for suspects in a credit card fraud ring, were relying on a courier who identified Mr. Blake as one of the buyers, the police said. The officers also had an Instagram photo of someone believed to be involved. That person, who Mr. Bratton said looked like Mr. Blake’s “twin brother,” turned out to have no role in the scheme.

Officer Frascatore then ran toward Mr. Blake and knocked him to the ground, raising concerns about “the inappropriateness of the amount of force that was used during the arrest,” Mr. Bratton said.

After releasing Mr. Blake, the officers did not fill out a “void arrest” form, leaving Mr. Bratton to learn what had happened from members of his public affairs staff, who told him about news reports about the episode.

Efforts to reach Officer Frascatore on Thursday night were unsuccessful. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association said in a statement that it had been “premature and unwarranted” to place him on desk duty.

Mr. Blake, 35, who retired from tennis two years ago, said the episode had drawn attention to the kind of rough arrest tactics that he believed were all too common in New York City.

“I do think most cops are doing a great job keeping us safe, but when you police with reckless abandon, you need to be held accountable,” Mr. Blake, whose mother is white and whose father was black, said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

The self-effacing tennis star, known on the tour for his speed and sportsmanship, was leaving the Grand Hyatt New York on East 42nd Street around noon on Wednesday to make an appearance for a corporate sponsor at the United States Open when Officer Frascatore, who was dressed in street clothes, barreled toward him.

“I was standing there doing nothing — not running, not resisting, in fact smiling,” Mr. Blake said, explaining that he thought the man might have been an old friend. Then, he said, the officer “picked me up and body slammed me and put me on the ground and told me to turn over and shut my mouth, and put the cuffs on me.”

A man who sells newspapers near the entrance to Grand Central Terminal said he watched the police rough up Mr. Blake. “They were real aggressive, like he robbed a bank,” the man, Charlie Sanders, 55, said. “They were shoving him around.”

Mr. Sanders said he saw the officers push Mr. Blake face-first into a large, mirrored building support beam near the Hyatt. With his head wrenched to the side and his hands cuffed behind him, Mr. Blake tried to talk.

“He told them, ‘I have my U.S. Open badge in my pocket,’ ” Mr. Sanders said.

Mr. Blake said Officer Frascatore did not explain why he was being detained. He counted himself lucky, he added, for not accidentally showing signs of resistance, and emerging with nothing more than cuts and bruises. He has retained Kevin Marino, a prominent New Jersey criminal defense lawyer.

“This happens too often,” Mr. Blake said, “and most of the time it’s not to someone like me.”

The bungled arrest arose out of an investigation into 16 fraudulent American Express credit card transactions, totaling about $18,000, that the police learned about on Monday from an Internet company that buys and delivers property for people in Manhattan. The police asked the company to let them supervise a delivery if the suspects made another purchase, said Robert K. Boyce, the chief of detectives, as they did the next day.

A delivery of high-end designer shoes was arranged for Wednesday, at the Hyatt’s concierge desk.

One of the buyers, a British man, James Short, 27, who was in New York on a student visa, met the courier and was immediately arrested. The courier then pointed to Mr. Blake from eight feet away, Chief Boyce said, identifying the tennis star as someone who had also bought items using false credit card information.

Officer Frascatore, a four-year veteran of the force, made a “fast approach,” Mr. Bratton said, grabbing Mr. Blake by the arm and taking him to the ground. Because he was working in street clothes, Officer Frascatore was not wearing a visible badge.

Mr. Blake was released when a retired police officer working as a security officer at the Hyatt told the officers they had detained a tennis star.

The officers found the second suspect they were seeking in the hotel and arrested him. Mr. Short and the second man, Jarmaine Grey, 26, were charged with grand larceny, identity theft and criminal possession of stolen property. At their arraignment late Thursday in Manhattan Criminal Court, both men were ordered held on $50,000 bond or cash with a 72-hour surety. They were also ordered to turn in their passports.

Mr. Blake told Mr. Bratton that he accepted the apology, but also made a firm request of the commissioner, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was continuing.

“He made the point that it is very much a bigger issue,” the person said. “That this is what happens every day and that this needs to be the start of a conversation about the ‘us and them’ attitude, how to deal with the policing in the communities where this occurs most frequently.”

Mr. Bratton, speaking at the news conference earlier in the day, was unequivocal in denying that race had played a role, saying, “I don’t believe at all that race was a factor.”

For Mr. Blake, a New York native who attended Harvard for two years before turning pro, the arrest was not the first time his race had thrown him into the spotlight. In 2001, he was locked in a fierce match at the U.S. Open when his opponent, Lleyton Hewitt, started arguing repeated foot-fault calls by one linesman.

“Look at him,” Mr. Hewitt shouted, pointing to the linesman, who was black. “Look at him,” Mr. Hewitt said again, pointing to Mr. Blake. “You tell me what the similarity is.”

Mr. Blake played down Mr. Hewitt’s remark at the time. He did the same on Thursday with regard to the suggestion that he had been racially profiled, though he told The Daily News a day earlier that “there’s probably a race factor involved.”

An active officer with more than 150 arrests, Officer Frascatore has received six citations for excellent police duty and meritorious service, the law enforcement official familiar with his work history said. The force-related complaint against him in 2013 that was partially substantiated was for failing to properly identify himself in a search situation.

A second law enforcement official, who also spoke anonymously because the investigation was continuing, said the inquiry was focused on two questions: what the officer was thinking when he rushed at Mr. Blake, and whether he used appropriate force, even if he believed Mr. Blake was the right person.

“A mistake is a mistake,” the law enforcement official said.

But, he added, “Part of the art of making a mistake like this is how you leave that mistake.” The official said it did not appear that Officer Frascatore ever explained things to Mr. Blake or apologized.

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WASHINGTON –  Say this about New York: If you can afford a first home there, you can probably afford one anywhere.

The same is true for San Francisco and, to a lesser extent, other hot job markets around the country for America’s millennial adults, who range in age from roughly 18 to 34. The challenge is that few millennials earn enough money to buy a home in these locales.

Prices have climbed to increasingly unaffordable levels while incomes have remained relatively flat. A result is that younger adults are renting for longer periods before buying their first home. A new analysis by the real estate firm Zillow found that the typical income for a first-time buyer is $54,340, pretty much the same as it was in the late 1970s after adjusting for inflation.

Over the same period, the median home price for this group, after inflation, has surged 42 percent to $140,328. The problem is that your situation can vary widely depending on where you live.

The median 33-year-old who is buying a first home spends 2.6 times his or her income on the property. Yet that looks like a relative bargain compared with New York, San Francisco and several other leading job markets. Zillow found that the price-to-income ratio is high for practically everyone in those metro areas, meaning that many have no choice but to keep renting.

Here are the metro areas where jobs are relatively plentiful but median home values significantly exceed incomes:

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

WASHINGTON –  Say this about New York: If you can afford a first home there, you can probably afford one anywhere.

The same is true for San Francisco and, to a lesser extent, other hot job markets around the country for America’s millennial adults, who range in age from roughly 18 to 34. The challenge is that few millennials earn enough money to buy a home in these locales.

Prices have climbed to increasingly unaffordable levels while incomes have remained relatively flat. A result is that younger adults are renting for longer periods before buying their first home. A new analysis by the real estate firm Zillow found that the typical income for a first-time buyer is $54,340, pretty much the same as it was in the late 1970s after adjusting for inflation.

Over the same period, the median home price for this group, after inflation, has surged 42 percent to $140,328. The problem is that your situation can vary widely depending on where you live.

The median 33-year-old who is buying a first home spends 2.6 times his or her income on the property. Yet that looks like a relative bargain compared with New York, San Francisco and several other leading job markets. Zillow found that the price-to-income ratio is high for practically everyone in those metro areas, meaning that many have no choice but to keep renting.

Here are the metro areas where jobs are relatively plentiful but median home values significantly exceed incomes:

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N.Y. / Region

Police Commissioner William J. Bratton arriving at a news conference on Thursday to discuss the arrest of James Blake.

By BENJAMIN MUELLER, AL BAKER and LIZ ROBBINS

September 10, 2015

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

WASHINGTON –  Say this about New York: If you can afford a first home there, you can probably afford one anywhere.

The same is true for San Francisco and, to a lesser extent, other hot job markets around the country for America’s millennial adults, who range in age from roughly 18 to 34. The challenge is that few millennials earn enough money to buy a home in these locales.

Prices have climbed to increasingly unaffordable levels while incomes have remained relatively flat. A result is that younger adults are renting for longer periods before buying their first home. A new analysis by the real estate firm Zillow found that the typical income for a first-time buyer is $54,340, pretty much the same as it was in the late 1970s after adjusting for inflation.

Over the same period, the median home price for this group, after inflation, has surged 42 percent to $140,328. The problem is that your situation can vary widely depending on where you live.

The median 33-year-old who is buying a first home spends 2.6 times his or her income on the property. Yet that looks like a relative bargain compared with New York, San Francisco and several other leading job markets. Zillow found that the price-to-income ratio is high for practically everyone in those metro areas, meaning that many have no choice but to keep renting.

Here are the metro areas where jobs are relatively plentiful but median home values significantly exceed incomes:

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.