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The 7 best U.S. cities for single parents to own a home

Raising kids alone already stretches a single paycheck thin. LendingTree ranks large U.S. cities where homeownership costs the least

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Raising a child without a second income already means stretching every dollar across rent or a mortgage, child care, groceries and health care. There's no partner's paycheck to absorb a bad month. Housing sits at the center of that balancing act. A monthly payment that runs even a little too high can crowd out everything else a family needs. For a single parent, buying a home carries the promise of stability once the mortgage is signed, but getting there and staying there both depend heavily on how much of that income the housing payment actually eats up. In some cities, that math leaves plenty of room for savings and emergencies. In others, it leaves almost none.

Nationally, single parents who own their homes spend just over a quarter of their income on housing, a share that climbs above 40% for those who rent instead. That split shapes which families can eventually make the leap from renting to owning. A smaller housing burden leaves more money free for a down payment, closing costs and the reserves lenders expect to see. Local wages and home prices drive most of the difference from city to city, but property taxes, insurance costs and the pace of new construction all factor into the final number too. A single parent doing the same job in two different cities can end up with housing costs that differ by 10 percentage points or more, a gap wide enough to change the type of home, school district or neighborhood a family can actually afford.

LendingTree analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data across the 50 largest American cities to measure exactly what share of income single-parent households spend on housing, breaking the numbers out separately for owners and renters. The gap between cities is stark. Single-parent homeowners in the most expensive markets hand over close to a third of their paycheck every month, while those in the most affordable cities keep that share below a quarter. These seven cities put the least strain on a single parent's budget once the mortgage is signed.

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Indianapolis holds the top spot on this list because single-parent homeowners there spend less of their paycheck on housing than anywhere else in the country. LendingTree found that a single parent who owns a home in Indianapolis puts 21.7% of household income toward housing, more than four full percentage points below the next closest city on this list and well under the national average of 25.7% for single-parent homeowners overall. That gap between Indianapolis and the national figure is roughly a full mortgage payment's worth of breathing room every few months.

The distance from the most expensive cities is even wider. A single parent who owns a home in Los Angeles spends 31.8% of income on housing, and one in New York spends 31.6%. Indianapolis homeowners keep roughly 10 cents of every dollar that those families don't. LendingTree's affordability index for ownership gives Indianapolis a perfect score of 100 among the 50 cities in the analysis, the only city to hit that ceiling.

Indianapolis also posts a single-parent homeownership rate of 42.2%, above the national rate of 39.2%, though wages there haven't caught up with the biggest coastal cities any more than home prices have. Renting tells a different story. Single-parent renters in Indianapolis hand over 41.3% of income, close to the middle of the pack among the 50 cities LendingTree studied and nearly 20 percentage points higher than what owners there pay. That gap between renting and owning is wider in Indianapolis than in almost any other city on this list, which makes the leap into ownership carry unusual financial weight for a single-income family trying to build equity instead of paying it to a landlord. Indianapolis's homeownership index of 64.2 puts it in the middle of the pack on that particular measure, which is why the city ranks lower on LendingTree's broader single-parent housing index, at 74.7, even as it tops this list for ownership costs specifically. The........

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