Which U.S. county has the most pressured housing market?

Amid a nationwide affordability crisis, Honolulu County in Hawaii stands out as the most cost-pressured housing market in the U.S.

Attom pulled third-quarter housing and income data for counties with at least 100,000 residents and at least 50 home sales. Among those 580 counties, The Real Deal analyzed the ones that are not only unaffordable but are also experiencing rapid housing price growth, along with a high volume of sales.

Honolulu County, which has a population of about 1 million, ranked high on those two metrics in the third quarter. Hawaii has long struggled with housing affordability because of its geographic isolation and tourism industry, which has displaced many longtime residents.

The typical homeowner in Honolulu County in the third quarter needed to spend 61.3 percent of their annual wages on the homeownership costs, which include property taxes, home insurance, mortgage payments and mortgage insurance. This placed the county among the top 8 percent.

Honolulu also saw 1,840 home sales cross the finish line during that time, again among the highest of the counties.

But where Honolulu really felt the pressure was on annual home price growth. With the median price surging 11 percent year over year, the county ranked among the top 2 percent.

TRD looked at the absolute number of deals during the quarter for this analysis to winnow down the results. But changing the analysis to account for the percentage of sales against a county’s total housing stock still left Honolulu high among the most pressured areas in the country.

Only one state, New Jersey, had two counties that checked all three boxes to be considered a pressured housing market. In Gloucester, the typical owner needs to spend 49 percent of their pay on home costs; in Mercer, this figure is 38 percent. Both counties have large commuter populations. Like Hawaii, New Jersey is also notoriously expensive. It’s also the most densely populated state in the country.

Meanwhile, counties in New York and California continue to rank among those whose homeowners need to spend the most of their income on home costs. In Kings County in New York and Santa Cruz and Marin Counties in California, owners need to spend more than what they bring in every year to afford a home.