Issue date: 5/4/05 Section: Opinion

If you aren't worried about where you are going to live once you graduate, maybe you should look into it.

In less than eight years, the Sacramento housing market has gone from one of the most affordable in the country to one of the most unaffordable. Sure, housing developments are springing up like daisies in a graveyard, but Sacramento's median price for a new home has increased from about $150,000 to over $350,000 by the end of 2005.

For all of you statisticians, that's a 133 percent increase in eight years. If you are a housing investor, that is great news, but if you are like a lot of us, getting ready to take on your first real career with a real paycheck, the news could not be more disheartening.

Even more disheartening is that the bulk of the change in prices has taken place while we diligently worked our way towards the degree that is supposed to help us make more money, which in turn would allow us to buy a new home. In an article published in The Business Journal on August 24, 2004, writer Mike McCarthy wrote, "No longer are minimum-wage earners, clerks and laborers the only people being priced out of the housing market. With the latest price hikes, teachers, police and state workers whose salaries aren't keeping up are finding themselves on the bubble."

Sacramento State sociology professor Amy Liu and some of her students conducted the fourth "Annual Survey of Public Opinion and Life Quality" in the Sacramento Region. They found that 43 percent of adults under 40 were considering a move based on the high cost of housing. They reported that 65 percent of those adults would most likely move out of California.

All of this bleak news may be mitigated by the ordinance adopted by Sacramento County in December 2004 that requires builders to dedicate at least 15 percent of their developments to affordable housing for people with modest incomes. The ordinance is an excellent idea that may help some of the 50 percent of the non-homeowners in Sacramento County realize their dream of owning their own home. This sounds like a program tailor-made for newly graduated professionals, except in March of this year, the Building Industry of Superior California filed a lawsuit challenging the ordinance.

As future homeowners, it is important that we all pay attention to housing issues that may seem like a lifetime away, but promise to affect our ability to achieve the American dream of home ownership once we graduate.

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