The Housing Inequality Index

What’s the average home price in your town? What’s the price of a home in the top 1%? To answer those questions and more, BusinessWeek.com crunched the numbers on housing prices for more than 200 metro areas. This table shows the median home price in each market—that is, the price at which half of the houses in the market are less expensive and half are more expensive. It also shows the price for the 99th percentile, or the point at which 99% of the houses are less expensive and 1% are more expensive. The “inequality index” is a function of these two data points. It’s the price for the 99th percentile divided by the median. These numbers, provided by New City Technology in Honolulu, an affiliate of Tokyo-based New City Corp., are for the first nine months of 2006, the most recent figures that are available. There are no statistics for Texas and other states that don’t release pricing data. Numbers for smaller cities are less reliable.