Priced out of 'the American Dream'

The Miami Herald reports:

It all started one day late last year, when Quintin Taylor sat at his dining room table and did the math on how much his apartment had cost him over three years.

Answer: close to $60,000. Sucked straight out of his pocket.

That's when the 30-year-old sports marketer began his quest to move out of his Pembroke Pines apartment into a house. His budget: $200,000 to $220,000.

Not an unreasonable target before the housing boom sent the midpoint price for a single-family home in South Florida to $340,000 in 2005 from $150,000 in 2000, according to a Miami Herald analysis of home sales. In 2006, even with a cooling real estate market, Taylor's odds are long.

In the past five years, the housing crunch in South Florida has moved up the economic ladder from the low-income to the middle-class, pricing a whole new layer of workers -- thousands of Quintin Taylors -- out of the market.

To live in a mid-priced house, a family in the Miami area earning the midpoint income must now spend 44 percent of its dollars on mortgage payments. That's double what it cost as recently as 1998 -- and close to Los Angeles at 46 percent and New York City at 49 percent.

Is Miami area real estate going to go up another 100% in 8 years? Don't bet on it.