The Worcester area has the most affordable housing stock in New England, according to new data from the National Association of Home Builders. The group’s Housing Opportunity Index (HOI) estimated that 79.5 percent of the area’s homes sold in the last quarter of 2008 were affordable to families making the median household income of $76,900. Thanks to falling home prices, the share of homes deemed “affordable” was up from 72.6 percent in the previous quarter and 57.8 percent in the previous year. That figure hit a low of 42.2 percent in 2005, when median sales prices in the Worcester area hit a high of $265,000.

The trend isn’t limited to Worcester. The NAHB reports that “Nationwide housing affordability surged at year-end 2008 to its highest level in at least five years.”

The HOI indicated that 62.4 percent of all new and existing homes that were sold in the final quarter of 2008 were affordable to families earning the national median income of $61,500, up considerably from the 56.1 percent of homes that were affordable to such families in the previous quarter and the 46.6 percent of homes that were affordable to them at the end of 2007.
The most affordable metro area was Lansing, Michigan (95.0 percent of homes affordable to families making the metro median income of $62,700), followed by Sandusky and Lima, both in Ohio. But given that all three have higher-than-average unemployment rates, they probably aren’t going to be attracting a lot of new families.

As for other Bay State metro areas, Barnstable ended 2008 with 43.2 percent of its homes deemed “affordable” — one of the lowest shares in the nation, but a big jump from the 12.1 percent logged in early 2006. Boston was at 54.2 percent; it had been at 22.3 percent in early 2006. Pittsfield was at 66.2 percent, but that’s actually not much of an improvement from recent years, as the housing bubble never got very high in the Berkshires. And Springfield was at 75.1 percent, up from 55.1 percent in early 2006.

The least affordable region was New York City, which recently took the title away from Los Angeles. But it has a long ways to go before matching the 42 consecutive quarters during the 1990s in which San Francisco was deemed the worst place in the country for an average-income family to buy a home.