
Simon Says: Can you afford to live in Augusta?
I ask my students at the beginning of an introduction to an economics course, “What are the most pressing problems economists should be addressing today?” The top answer recently has always been inflation, but this year, housing made the top three problems (the other was healthcare costs). The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta produces a Home Ownership Affordability Monitor (HOAM – get it?) for all Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the US. The monitor measures the ability of a median-income household to afford a median-priced home. Affordability is defined as








