San Francisco, CA median home price — $530,662
Buffalo, NY median home price — $51,064
yes, that's a factor of ten. no wonder Rochester rents creep down into the $100/month range.
The census data is kind of fun because it makes things you already knew glaringly obvious. Like Toledo, OH has the least foreign born residents of anywhere in the USA, and California has the most. And that San Jose and San Francisco are the most expensive places to rent an apartment. But Santa Ana as third? The most people own their own home in Aurora, Colorado. And disparity - some of the places with the most college edumacated folk are also the places with the least high school diplomas (Oakland, CA - 22% didn't graduate high school and 35% graduated college). Languages: 26% of Californians speak Spanish at home, but only 0.7% of people in Maine do (Maine-iacs?). (And it's 76% in El Paso).
http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Products/Ranking/index.htm (from
metafilter)
Sufficiently motivated persons can even download the raw data, in case you want to know things like which state has the most spanish-speaking, college educated house-husbands with telephones.