The ranking is based on median home prices. Muncie’s median price is $77,900, according to realtor.com, about $3,000 cheaper than the next town on the list, Charleston, Illinois.
Although this may not seem like a bad thing for frugal college students, Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research, said because home values are closely linked to the quality of the community, the lower the prices in a city are, the lower the quality of the city will be.
“I don’t think [being the most affordable] is a good thing at all,” Hicks said. “It’s often misinterpreted as a good thing. The fact is, there’s a reason for affordability and the reason is the quality of the place remains problematic for big portions of the city and it remains questionable for the quality of schools.”
Muncie's affordable housing, Hicks said, could be part of the reason why Muncie’s population hasn’t changed much overall since the 1960s. It's hovered steady around 70,000, according to the U.S. Census.
“It’s not good for existing homeowners, because many use households for growth in the value of the home as a store in savings … so it’ll be worth a lot more when you retire and sell it,” Hicks said. “This suggests houses won’t run up in value so it makes it a less attractive place to relocate.”
Bringing in new faculty to teach at Ball State can be especially difficult for that reason, Hicks said, even though the university is one of the largest employers in the area.
“It’s very difficult to recruit faculty who almost exclusively come from larger universities,” Hicks said. “We’re trying to move them to a small town that is underinvested in quality of place. … It turns off a lot of people.”
For college students coming to the area, it isn’t as much of a problem because they don’t expect or can’t afford higher quality living areas. They stay mainly within the campus area, away from the communities and schools that are the problem, Hicks said.
The cheaper rent prices than other top Indiana schools aren’t a turnoff for them — they welcome it.
In Bloomington, the home of Indiana University, rent for lower end apartments is in the $400 range, where in Muncie they’re more priced around the $200-$300 range, according to apartmentguide.com. In West Lafayette, where Purdue is, the apartments range from $400-$500.
While Muncie has made improvements over the past few years to its schools and community, Hicks said it will take a while longer — maybe up to 25 years — to catch up to where the city should be at now.
“We shouldn’t be pleased with the affordability ranking, we should wonder what we can do to make Muncie a place where people are scrambling to,” Hicks said. “We know we’ve been successful … when we finally drop off these affordability rankings.”
Muncie also got the top spot for affordability in 2000 from the National Association of Home Builders, in 2007 from the Coldwell Banker College Home Price Comparison Index study and in 2010 from Forbes.
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