$217,000 a year to afford a home in Boston? Who can even afford that?

To buy a single-family home in Boston, you need a household income of $217,000. The staggering — though maybe not surprising — number released recently through the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, raises an important question: If that’s the bar for buying a home in Greater Boston, who can afford it?

The answer is not many people, according to a Boston Globe analysis of US Census data. The average Boston-area household makes only $107,000, and there are disparities across race and ethnicity, data show. Black and Latino residents are three times less likely than white residents to be able to afford the average Boston home.

The Harvard research estimates that a single-family home in the Boston metropolitan area in March 2024 was on average $705,000. The researchers used an affordability formula to estimate that homebuyers therefore need an annual income of $217,000 to buy a median-priced single-family home in Boston.

Boston, however, has a significant amount of multifamily homes. So the Globe applied the same formula to Census data on overall median home values in the city and found that homebuyers need an income of roughly $190,000 annually to afford a $618,000 median-priced home.

Most Boston households don’t earn enough. This is due, in part, to a national housing crisis that is being shaped by skyrocketing prices, limited supply in the market, and household income not increasing quickly enough. In Massachusetts, home prices are four times higher than they were in the 1980s, while median household income is only twice as high as it was in the 1980s, according to a 2023 Spotlight investigation.

Most of the city unaffordable

Most American families need six figures to afford a home in nearly half the states in the country, including Massachusetts, according to a 2024 Bankrate study.

The Globe applied the joint center’s income formula to median home values in Massachusetts’s Census tracts to determine the recommended income for buying homes around the state. (Census tracts are small geographical subdivisions of a larger county that are used for the decennial population count.) The results show that about 80 percent of Boston is off limits to families without a six-figure income, 85 percent of Suffolk County.

As shown in the map below, most homes in the Boston area demand high-incomes, but cities in Western Massachusetts and those south of Boston have more affordable homes, with fewer tracts that require six-figure-incomes.

Racial disparity exacerbates crisis

While most Boston households don’t have the $217,000 income recommended to buy a median-priced home, the city’s racial wealth gap exacerbates the affordability crisis for certain families. Black and Latino families have an even tougher shot at owning an average-priced home in or around Boston. Less than one-quarter of white and Asian households earn an income of over $200,000, according to Census data, and only 8 percent of Black and Latino households do.

Fewer options for Black and Latino buyers

Black and Latino Bostonians on average do not earn enough income to afford an average-priced home in any Census tract in the city. When looking at the entire state, the average Black or Latino household in Boston can afford to buy homes in just 4 percent of Massachusetts Census tracts, including cities such as Springfield and Worcester. Compare that to white and Asian households, which can afford median-priced homes in 22 to 24 percent of Census tracts throughout the state. Those same households fare only slightly better than Black and Latino families around Boston.

This story was produced by the Globe’s Money, Power, Inequality team, which covers the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston. You can sign up for the newsletter here.

Vince can be reached at vince.dixon@globe.com. Follow him @vince_dixon_.