By Tim Henderson, Stateline.org

Like many moderate-income workers, public school teachers Julia and Scott Whitnall didn’t think they’d become homeowners in their early 30s. Especially in California.

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“We never felt homeownership was in our cards. But we did it!” Julia Whitnall said. “We’re extremely happy.”

The couple moved May 16 to a $509,000 two-bedroom house in Ripon, east of San Francisco in the Central Valley region.

It wasn’t easy. Despite a relatively high combined income of $140,000 from their nearby jobs, they had to compromise on size and take on extra work at summer camps to pull it off. Then they had to exercise patience as the sellers struggled to find a new home.

High interest rates and high prices in a still-competitive housing market continue to make it tough for first-time buyers, even those with good but moderate incomes.

On a national level, households making $75,000 to $100,000 — typical of teachers, nurses and skilled trades workers in many states — face a daunting lack of homes they can afford. That’s according to new research by the National Association of Realtors and Realtor.com based on listings in March of this year compared with 2024. However, the numbers showed an encouraging 20% increase in homes for sale, affordable or not.

Despite more houses for sale, those moderate-income buyers — which the report called “middle- and upper-middle-income buyers” — are much more hard-pressed to find an affordable home than they were in 2019, when almost half the homes on the market were affordable to them. This year they can afford only 21.2% of homes on the market — a slight improvement compared with 20.8% in 2024, according to the report.

It also found that a few states are improving in affordability for people in the $75,000-to-$100,000 income range. But many states are not.

The largest affordability gaps are in California, Hawaii, Idaho, Massachusetts and Montana, where such households can afford fewer than 12% of houses on the market. By contrast, they could afford about half the houses for sale in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio and West Virginia.

There’s progress in states that are adding more housing at moderate price points: Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Florida and Utah, according to the Realtors report.

Balanced markets

Nationwide, to get home markets back in line with moderate-income families, the United States needs 416,000 more homes for sale at or below $255,000, according to the report.

“In many places, we’re still seeing a huge mismatch between income levels and what’s available to buy for moderate-income families,” said Nadia Evangelou, the National Association of Realtors’ senior economist and director of real estate research.

“We are no longer in crisis mode, but we are still very far from where we need to be. We can’t fix it overnight. It will take years,” Evangelou said.

Heather, who asked not to share her last name for privacy reasons, said she can’t even think of buying a house near her job on Long Island, New York. She makes more than $100,000 as a registered nurse and her family makes $170,000 with her husband’s job in building maintenance. But $4,400 in rent and $2,000 in monthly day care costs for three children have them living paycheck to paycheck.

“We can’t even afford a small car repair, let alone a mortgage in our hometown” of Ronkonkoma in Suffolk County, Heather said. Their jobs exposed her and her husband to risks in the pandemic that her neighbors avoided with remote work, she said. But she now feels like she’s in worse shape financially than she was in 2019 and considers moving away.

“All of our hard work feels like it was for nothing,” Heather said. “It’s disheartening that we can’t afford to live where we grew up, but that’s the reality we are facing.”

Some states can still be a refuge of affordability.

Ashley and Tristan Jonas bought a $252,000 house in northwest Ohio after three years of getting shut out by higher or all-cash offers. Ashley Jonas, 32, trained as a teacher but now works in skilled trades as a project coordinator for a countertop company, and the couple makes about $140,000 with Tristan Jonas’ job as a computer programmer.

“We happened to hit the market at the right time in 2025,” Ashley Jonas said. “We bid on this house just as [President Donald] Trump was announcing tariffs. I think a lot of people were holding their coin purses. We weren’t.”

Help for teachers

Teachers, who generally make less than nurses or trades workers, are particularly squeezed. Some states, facing teacher shortages in local schools, are working to raise pay. And increasingly, some schools and hospitals are providing housing to lure more teachers and nurses.

“We lose so many teachers because they can’t find housing here,” said Autumn Rivera, a 20-year teaching veteran and 2022 Colorado Teacher of the Year. Despite her experience and credentials, Rivera said she can’t contemplate buying even a townhouse in the rural resort town of Glenwood Springs, where she teaches.

Prices for those townhouses now start in the $700,000 range, more than twice what they were when she last considered buying in 2019. Rivera feels lucky to have a reasonable rent by sharing a home with its owner, but many teachers in her Roaring Fork Schools need the 117 apartments provided by the district with affordable rent, she said. The district hopes the apartments will allow teachers to save up for a home; it has also built 14 houses for staff with Habitat for Humanity and Holy Cross Energy.

One way to make homebuying more feasible for teachers is to pay them more — a strategy that paid off for New Mexico, one of the few bright spots in a different report on teachers’ inability to afford housing, which was published this month by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group.

Beginning teachers in Albuquerque saw a 60% increase in pay between 2019 and 2025, which fell just short of a 65% jump in home prices, according to the report. The report credited a state law that raised teacher salaries, including starting pay, by $10,000.

“We’re dealing with the issue of teachers being able to live in the communities where they’re actually working,” said state Rep. Joy Garratt, a Democrat who sponsored a new law, signed in April, that sets higher minimum salaries for teachers effective July 1.

Detroit schools also gave teachers with advanced degrees a pay boost of up to 50% since 2019, about the same increase as home prices, according to the report from the National Council on Teacher Quality. Albuquerque and Detroit are on the report’s list of most affordable places for beginning teachers to live.

But nationally, on average, experienced teachers who started in 2019 are less able to afford a home now than when they began, according to the report.

“Teacher pay has gone up 24% in the last five years, which some might say is solid growth, and yet the increase in house for purchase has gone up 47%,” said Heather Peske, the organization’s president.

“Housing prices are critical to being able to attract and keep great teachers,” Peske said. “People will be leaving the profession trying to find something that pays enough for housing. And bottom line, kids won’t get as good an education.”

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Today is Saturday, May 31, the 151st day of 2025. There are 214 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On May 31, 1921, a two-day massacre erupted in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as white mobs began looting and burning the affluent Black district of Greenwood over reports a Black man had assaulted a white woman in an elevator; though the exact number remains unknown, as many as 300 Black Tulsans were killed during the riot.

Also on this date:

In 1790, President George Washington signed into law the first U.S. copyright act.

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A 700-pound boulder pins Alaska man face-down in a glacier creek for three hours

Loretta Swit, Emmy-winner who played Houlihan on pioneering TV series ‘M.A.S.H.,’ has died at 87

In 1889, over 2,200 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, died when the South Fork Dam collapsed, sending 20 million tons of water rushing through the town.

In 1949, former State Department official and accused spy Alger Hiss went on trial in New York, charged with perjury (the trial ended with a hung jury, but Hiss was convicted in a second trial.)

In 1970, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck the Ancash region of Peru; the quake, combined with the landslide it triggered, killed an estimated 67,000 people.

In 1977, the 800-mile-long Trans-Alaska oil pipeline was completed after three years of construction.

In 2005, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein confirmed a Vanity Fair magazine report naming former FBI official W. Mark Felt as the Watergate scandal informant previously known only as “Deep Throat.”

In 2009, Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, died in Hampshire, England at 97.

In 2014, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American soldier held prisoner in Afghanistan, was freed by the Taliban in exchange for five Afghan detainees from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Bergdahl, who’d gone missing in June 2009, later pleaded guilty to endangering his comrades by walking away from his post in Afghanistan; his sentence included a dishonorable discharge, a reduction in rank and a fine, but no prison time.)

In 2019, a longtime city employee opened fire in a municipal building in Virginia Beach, Virginia, killing 12 people on three floors before police shot and killed him; officials said DeWayne Craddock had resigned by email hours before the shooting.

Today’s Birthdays:

Actor-filmmaker Clint Eastwood is 95.
Football Hall of Famer Joe Namath is 82.
Actor Tom Berenger is 76.
Actor-comedian Chris Elliott is 65.
Actor Lea Thompson is 64.
Musician Corey Hart is 63.
Rapper Darryl “DMC” McDaniels is 61.
Actor Brooke Shields is 60.
TV host Phil Keoghan is 58.
Jazz musician Christian McBride is 53.
Actor Archie Panjabi is 53.
Actor Colin Farrell is 49.
Singer Normani is 29.
Tennis player Iga Świątek is 24.

SEATTLE — Maybe it was the result of the adjustments he made in the batting cages in recent days that Carlos Correa referenced. Or maybe it really was the power of his positive thinking, like he believed.

But either way, Willi Castro was well aware of the fact that Mariners closer Andrés Muñoz had yet to allow a run and told himself that he would be the one to change that. And with two outs in the ninth inning, down three runs, he sure did.

Castro’s two-run home run off Muñoz, his second long ball of the night, brought the Twins back to within a run. A couple batters later, the Twins had tied it, using hits from Byron Buxton, fresh off the injured list, and Trevor Larnach, who finished with four on the day, to tie it up. An inning later, Carlos Correa jumpstarted a six-run 10th inning with his third home run in seven games, this one helping lift the Twins to a 12-6 win over the Seattle Mariners at T-Mobile Park.

“It was as much fun as we’ve had playing baseball this year,” Correa said. “Probably the best game of the year right there and it felt great.”

It sure didn’t start out that way for the Twins (31-25).

Zebby Matthews, making his third start of the season, allowed a pair of singles to lead off the bottom of the first. Shortly after, Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh teed off on the first pitch he saw from Matthews. The two North Carolinians hail from the same town, Cullowhee, and attended the same high school.

“Anybody (else) would have been great,” Matthews griped, after lamenting that he knew Raleigh “too well for that to happen.”

Raleigh’s home run — the first of two on the day for him (the other coming off his former Florida State teammate Cole Sands) — was the first of two in the inning off Matthews, plunging the Twins into a four-run deficit. But Matthews recovered quickly, throwing six scoreless innings after that, giving up just two hits and cruising through the Mariners’ (30-26) lineup quickly and efficiently. His seven-inning effort marked the longest outing of his major league career.

“I got pretty pissed off there, I can’t lie to you,” Matthews said. “Nobody wants to go out there and give up a four spot that early. … We stuck to the report and it worked out better.”

Sure did, as Matthews, who gave up four runs within the first five batters of the game, settled in well, as his teammates started chipping away at Seattle’s lead. The Twins scored a pair of runs in the fourth, one on Larnach’s eighth home run of the season. Castro’s first home run, which came in the seventh inning, brought the Twins back within a run.

But things looked bleak when Sands allowed the two-run blast to Raleigh in the eighth, putting the Twins down three once more. And they looked even bleaker when Muñoz, who had thrown 23 2/3 scoreless innings heading into Friday, got the first two outs of the ninth inning, their win probability in the game at that point infinitesimal.

“In the world, there’s very few guys that come out of bullpens that are as good a pitcher and with the stuff he has,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “It’s excellent stuff but we had excellent at-bats. … Hard not to like what you watched there in that inning.”

Or what they watched in the 10th, too, when the Twins piled on. Correa’s home run preceded two-RBI hits each from Buxton and Larnach as the Twins kept being rewarded for their good at-bats. All told, the Twins scored nine runs in the final two innings of the game, using contributions from up and down the lineup to do so.

“We put up a lot of runs but the way we did it, late in innings, two strikes, some homers, some missiles, some just good hitting, some using the opposite field — there was a lot going on there,” Baldelli said. “I think that’s got to be one of the greatest wins that we’ve had to this point and one of the best wins that I can really remember in recent memory.”

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With their top scorer out, Kayla McBride and Alanna Smith largely took over Friday for the Minnesota Lynx.

But it was Natisha Hiedeman with the game-winning 3-pointer with 5.5 seconds left and the Lynx rallied past Phoenix 74-71 in a game between the top two teams in the Western Conference.

Out of a timeout, Phoenix turned the ball over with 13.6 seconds left to give the Lynx a chance.

McBride scored 20 points and Smith had 19 for Minnesota (6-0) which played without Napheesa Collier, who missed the game with right knee soreness.

Coach Cheryl Reeve said pregame that Collier’s pain wasn’t from anything that happened in a recent game.

“It’s something that she’s been dealing with since probably 2023, some knee stuff. Just more precautionary,” Reeve said.

Named the Western Conference Player of the Week on Wednesday, Collier leads the league in scoring at 26.8 points per game.

“We’ve got a good basketball team,” Reeve said. “Certainly, we’re great with Phee; we think we’re a very good basketball team without Phee.”

Maybe so, but Minnesota struggled from the field, shooting a season-low 36.2%, but was clutch when it mattered going 8 for 18 in the fourth quarter, making three of its eight 3-pointers.

Bridget Carleton, Jessica Shepard and Courtney Williams were a combined 10 for 31 from the field.

Phoenix (4-2) outscored Minnesota 44-22 in the paint.

Phoenix played without Alyssa Thomas (strained left calf), who is averaging 15.2 points, eight assists and 7.6 rebounds per game to start the season.

Four upcoming games to be on free TV

Beginning with Sunday’s 7:30 p.m. game at Golden State, four Lynx broadcasts on FanDuel Sports Network will be simulcast on KARE Ch. 11.

The other games are June 8 at Dallas, June 29 vs. Connecticut and July 6 vs. Chicago.

“We are thrilled to return to free over-the-air television with KARE 11, providing Lynx fans more access to incredible Lynx basketball,” Lynx President of Business Operations Carley Knox said in a statement. “This partnership allows both organizations to remain committed to direct connection and engagement with fans and viewers alike.”

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