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V. Comparative Analysis

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Executive Summary

Executive Summary

V. Comparative Analysis

We have focused on the housing dynamics within the Charlotte MSA, particularly the region's various challenges. Without context, it can appear that the challenges and difficulties the region faces are unique or out of proportion to what other regions are facing. In this section, we expand our analysis and compare the Charlotte region to other regional and national competitor cities. All data in this section comes from the American Community Survey one-year estimates from 201421 produced by the U.S. Census Bureau unless stated otherwise. Because the census did not release the one-year estimates for 2020, we calculate the growth rates of various measures based on the annualized growth from 2019 to 2021.

We will compare Charlotte’s performance in several key metrics with our competitor cities. These metrics include:

• Population and population growth. • Land prices. • Median home prices. • Median multiple. • Median rents. • Median price-to-rent ratio • Cost burden of housing.

Our analysis shows that although the Charlotte region faces challenges, the Charlotte region is doing well overall when compared with many of our regional and national competitor cities. In particular, the region has relatively low-cost housing as compared with many of our peer cities in both the region and nationally. The Charlotte housing market exhibits traits common among almost all rapidly growing cities.

We have selected seven regional and 11 national competitor cities for this analysis. The seven regional cities are Asheville, Greensboro and Raleigh in North Carolina; Charleston, Columbia and Spartanburg in South Carolina; and Richmond in Virginia. We aim to examine the major economic centers in North Carolina and South Carolina. We included Richmond because it is

closer in size to these regional cities than the set of national competitors. The national comparison set includes Atlanta; Austin, Cincinnati; Denver; Indianapolis; Memphis, Nashville, Portland, Sacramento, San Antonio; and Tampa. We choose the national competitor cities based on one of two criteria. First, we choose cities with populations similar to that of Charlotte, which led us to

The State of Housing in Charlotte Report 2022

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