HOUSING COSTS IN ST. LOUIS CITY are generally affordable, according to a February poll of likely voters.
About 79% of respondents in the poll said their housing costs are either “somewhat” or “very” affordable, compared to only 9% who said their housing costs are not affordable at all.
Forty-three percent said their housing costs have stayed about the same over the past two years, while 41% said their housing costs have gone up.
The poll of 463 likely voters was conducted between Feb. 12 and Feb. 14 by Show Me Victories, a Democratic political consulting and polling firm based in St. Louis.
“The results seem to confirm the anecdotal evidence we hear from time to time that St. Louis is one of the country’s more affordable housing markets,” said Bryce Summary, the firm’s director of research.
The survey data was collected using interactive robocalling that includes calls to landline phones and texts to mobile phones. The margin of error for the poll is plus or minus 4.6 percent. The survey data was weighted to match the demographics of likely March 2021 voters.
Summary cautioned that the poll results are not representative of city residents as a whole, since likely voters tend to be more affluent than average and are also more likely to own their own homes. Show Me Victories typically targets likely voters in its polling because the firm’s clients are most interested in that group, he added.
[Editor’s note: Show Me Victories offered to conduct the poll following a January conversation with me that touched on a range of issues facing city voters ahead of the March 2 primary elections. Housing affordability was one of the issues we discussed. Following that conversation, I suggested questions on the topic to Show Me Victories, which the firm then incorporated into one of its polls.]
In the poll, 54% of respondents said their housing costs were “somewhat affordable,” while 25% said their costs were “very affordable.”
Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they owned their home, while 29% said they were renters.
Regarding the location of their homes, the breakdown is as follows: 45% in South City, 32% in North City, and 23% in Central City, which includes Downtown and the Central Corridor neighborhoods.
The poll was conducted just before the spring house selling season got underway, in a national economy being goosed by trillions of dollars of federal spending as the country emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This market’s just wild,” said Brett McMahon, an agent with Tower Real Estate Group who does most of his business on the city’s South Side. “Everything is going up. I’ve got clients putting in bids that are $25,000 above asking price, and they’re still getting outbid.”
McMahon said buyers new to the housing market are at a disadvantage to existing homeowners who are looking to move. Because the latter are selling in a hot housing market, they can use their proceeds to outbid rivals who have to pull together their down payments from scratch.
Even so, St. Louis remains far more affordable than faster-moving markets like Nashville, Tenn. and Austin, Texas, and this shows no sign of changing, McMahon said.
St. Louis consistently appears on lists of the country’s most affordable cities. A recent item in National Mortgage News included St. Louis on a list of 12 cities where buying is currently cheaper than renting.
For the four weeks ending May 2, the median sale price of a home in St. Louis City was $197,000, a 14% increase from a year earlier, according to data from Redfin, a national real estate brokerage.
“All the bars, the restaurants, the walkability — there are more people moving into St. Louis City than there used to be,” McMahon said. “Growing up in the city, it seemed like everyone was always moving the county. For once, it’s good to see people who want to live in the city.”
Show Me Victories accurately predicted the results of the April 6 runoff election for mayor between Treasurer Tishaura Jones and 20th Ward Alderwoman Cara Spencer. Jones prevailed in the race with about 52% of the vote, compared to 48% for Spencer.
That was in line with a poll a week before the election from the firm that showed Jones with a five-percentage-point lead, a lead that was within the poll’s margin of error. –McP–
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This was interesting.
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