UsableMarkets

The NYTimes has a nice information graphic comparing housing affordability across cities. To smooth the data, they look at the average cost of a home vs. the median income in those cities. This provides us with a nice chart that allows for to compare housing affordability across cities.

But, from an information design perspective, they could have gone one step further. They could have charted the percent changes in this measure for each city, which would have allowed for even easier comparison of data between cities. For example, each city would have the same starting point on the graph, leading to easier comparison.

Nice job … but not perfect.

~alex