For the most part, those affordable homes were clustered in inland areas of the eastern half of the United States—in particular Illinois, Michigan,Indiana, and other Midwestern states—as well as pockets of Nevada,Utah, and Wyoming. (We based local market calculations on local market incomes.) In three localities—Guymon, OK; Fort Dodge, IA; and Brookings, SD—every home for sale in February met our standards for affordability. On the flip side, those without deep pockets shouldn’t even bother house hunting in the San Luis Obispo–Paso Robles area, in California’s Central Coast wine territory, where less than 4% of February’s listings were affordable.

Looking at the map above, you may see some light-blue patches surrounded by orange. Could these be oases of possibility where you could buy a home and still commute to your job in a higher-priced area? Well, not unless you enjoy epic commutes. The geographical units that we use (the government calls them Core Based Statistical Areas, or CBSAs) are defined by clusters where people live and work. People don’t tend to live in one cluster and work in another. Even on the East Coast, with its smaller CBSAs, the commute would be prohibitively long.

If your budget is limited, don’t set your heart on a newly built home. In February, our site had more than 7,700 actively selling new-home communities across the U.S., with almost 57,000 inventory homes available for sale. But by the same standards as above, only 21% of those new homes were affordable.