photo by: AdobeStock image

New Row House Construction with wood sheathing and asphalt roof

Lawrence is in the business of giving young people a start — the biggest event of the year, after all, is named “commencement.”

Starter homes, though, not so much.

In fact, it is difficult to find a city that is worse at it, a new report suggests. The trade journal Construction Coverage found that just 18% of Lawrence residents under the age of 35 own a home in Lawrence. Only seven metro areas in the U.S. ranked worse in the study.

On a note that is surely related, the report found Lawrence is near the bottom of the list when it comes to having homes that qualify as a “starter home.” The report ranked Lawrence No. 307 out of 334 metros areas in that category.

With those two statistics in tow, you can imagine how Lawrence fared in Construction Coverage’s annual report entitled “Best U.S. Cities to Find a Starter Home.” Lawrence ranked No. 279 out of 334 metro areas, placing it squarely in the bottom quartile of America. When measured only against smaller metro areas — communities with less than 350,000 people — Lawrence ranked No. 168 out of 185 communities, again solidly in the bottom quartile.

For the record, it was the worst in the state, as well.

In a moment, I’ll show you a long list of where communities in the region rank. But first back to those two statistics that really drug Lawrence down. The finding that only 18.4% of Lawrence residents 35 and younger own a home might not be particularly surprising to us locals. We are a college town, after all.

Indeed, college towns, with their above-average percentage of young residents, are likely to get penalized by this particular statistic. However, dismiss this finding as a “college town thing,” at your own peril. Again, Lawrence ranked eighth lowest in the country. That means there are a lot of college towns doing better in this ranking than Lawrence.

Ames, Iowa has an under-35 homeownership rate of 30%, Waco, Texas was at nearly 37%, and Provo, Utah was at nearly 43%, just to give a few examples from the Big 12 Conference.

The places that had a lower under-35 homeownership rate than Lawrence were a mix of college towns, the largest metro area in the country, and several other California communities. They were: Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell, 15%; Bloomington, home to Indiana University, 16.9%; Santa Maria/Santa Barbara, California, 16.9%; San Luis Obispo, California, 17.3%; Los Angeles, 17.8%; Champaign, home to the University of Illinois, 17.9%; and Corvallis, home to Oregon State University, 17.9%.

That list makes me wonder, perhaps worry, about what else college towns and California communities have in common. But perhaps the more interesting thing to wonder about is why Lawrence also ranks relatively low in the percentage of homes that meet the definition of a starter home.

The report’s authors determined a starter home needed to meet two definitions. First, it needed to be three bedrooms or less. That’s not a real problem in Lawrence. Large swaths of the city are dominated by three bedroom homes, it seems. The second part of the definition, however, is that it needs to be an owner-occupied three-bedroom home. The authors, right or wrong, seemingly are saying that if a home currently is a rental property, its chances of becoming available as house that could be purchased as a starter home are not great.

Of course, Lawrence has a large rental industry. While apartments are the most visible part of that industry, there are many single family homes that are rented to students and other tenants. The idea that landlords — who compete with traditional home buyers for new listings — drive up the price of housing in Lawrence is not a new idea.

It was the key argument neighborhood groups made years ago when convincing the City Commission to pass an ordinance stating that traditional single-family zoned homes could have no more than three unrelated tenants. Whether that ordinance has helped control housing prices or simply caused landlords to seek more houses to serve their clients, is a matter of debate. For that matter, so too is the overall impact the rental industry has on Lawrence’s housing prices.

This report doesn’t get at the heart of that matter. What would be interesting is to see what percentage of single family homes in Lawrence are renter-occupied, and then compare that to other communities. This report doesn’t quite do that, but it does show — for some reason — that Lawrence doesn’t have a very high percentage of homes that are three bedrooms or smaller that are owner-occupied.

I know my first home — a two-bedroom bungalow — met that definition, and I’m guessing that’s the case for lots of other people too. Figuring out why there is a shortage of those in Lawrence is likely an important question when trying to find solutions for the affordable housing problem in town.

This report does come at a time when Lawrence is in a real single family building slump. The city set record lows for single family home construction in both 2022 and 2024. The answer may be as simple as that: Other communities simply are constructing more homes. Nationally, homes with four-plus bedrooms are the most common type of newly constructed home currently, so those wouldn’t help add to the starter home inventory. But, three bedroom homes aren’t far behind. Three bedroom homes still represent more than 40% of all new homes constructed nationally. It would be interesting to see if that is true in Lawrence.

That’s a project for another day. For now, here’s a lengthy list of starter home statistics for communities throughout the region and the Big 12 Conference, and their national rank in the Construction Coverage report:

No. 39: Joplin: 75.6% starter homes, $184,803 median starter home price, 42.9% under-35 ownership rate.

No. 43: Lubbock, Texas: 75.2%; $174,896, 23.8%

No. 51: St. Jospeh, Mo.: 75.5%, $184,889; 44.9%

No. 73: Topeka: 73.8%, $184,514, 43.1%

No. 90: Waco, Texas: 71.7%, $217,239, 36.9%

No. 99: Morgantown, W.V.: 73.8%, $211,533, 28.7%

No. 115: Tulsa, 69.9%, $209,286, 48.9%

No. 122: Oklahoma City: 69.5%, $207,619, 33.7%

No. 149: Springfield, Mo.: 69.9%, $224,024, 35.2%

No. 152: St. Louis: 69.4%, $232,230, 43.8%

No. 180: Jefferson City, Mo.,69.4%, $225,415, 45.4%

No. 187: Des Moines, Iowa: 63.8%, $249,236, 44.3%

No. 202: Wichita: 59.6%, $180,857, 39.5%

No. 227: Kansas City: 61.0%, $249,435, 40.5%

No. 234: Omaha, Neb.: 62.9%, $254,178, 38.6%

No. 241: Manhattan: 60.6%, $210,670, 20.1%

No. 244: Ames: 62.4%, $229,223, 30.1%

No. 252: Fayetteville, Ark.: 65.8%, $305,263, 31.2%

No. 264: Iowa City: 59.0%, $248,881, 23.2%

No. 278: Columbia: 62.6%, $255,481, 26.8%

No. 279: Lawrence: 58.2%, $272,501, 18.4%

No. 287: Lincoln, Neb.: 63.5%, $271,179,26.6%

No. 307: Provo: 32.7%, $453,808, 42.7%