More and more Californians can “afford” the home they own.

Yes, I know how pricey it is to buy a home. But at least a growing number of those folks who’ve become homeowners are paying the house payment on time.

In recent years when we typically talk about home “affordability” in California, we’re chatting about the financial challenges of buying. But the juggling of the household budget doesn’t stop when the deal is closed.

It was not too long ago that many owners couldn’t “afford” to keep a home. Oddly, that was during a recent peak of house hunting “affordability.” Do not forget a key element of the last California housing “crisis” was too many distressed properties for sale, not a shortage of house-hunting options.

Ponder what my trusty spreadsheet found inside some real estate industry math.

Start with the buyer’s plight. For the second quarter, the California Association of Realtor’s main “affordability” index estimated that 26 percent of households earning the statewide median income could comfortably afford to buy California’s median-priced single-family home.

Yes, that was down from 29 percent a year earlier. Yes, it’s below this century’s 32 percent average. And yes, the last time this house hunter’s “affordability” benchmark was lower was December 2007, just as real estate’s last bubble was bursting.

Yet a grain of salt is usually required to digest this house hunter’s “affordability” measurement. For starters, a little more than half of Californians already live in a home they own — and almost a third of those folks own that residence free-and-clear of mortgages. And those owners with mortgages are doing O.K.

CoreLogic reports that just 2.4 percent of California’s mortgaged homes were at least one payment late in May vs. 4.2 percent nationally. Only eight states had better delinquency rates — a stunning turnaround for California that was once a foreclosure leader.

These recent statewide late-payment rates run less than half of the average level since 2000 and one-sixth the delinquency pace of the recessionary peak.

So how could statewide “affordability” peak for house hunters when a huge slice of Californian owners could not “afford” their home loans?

Well, I’m no fan of the often-quoted homebuying “affordability” indexes that attempt to put the high-cost of California housing into one type of financial perspective.

These yardsticks measure the theoretical ability of the typical California family (with a mid-range household income) to purchase a common single-family home (at the mid-range selling price) without busting the family budget.

The fault of these “affordability” indexes is looking at the world solely from an individual purchaser’s perspective. What this math — mixing selling prices, mortgage rates, and income levels — badly misses is the big economic picture, especially the ups and downs of the job market.

Look, you need a job to buy. The “affordability” hurdle has recently been overcome because a statewide hiring spree has created more house hunters.

Equally important to the housing market is what happens after the purchase is closed as house hunters become real-life owners with a mortgage check to be written.

In the nasty Great Recession, the job market went in reverse and the statewide unemployment rate soared to double-digit levels. Home prices collapsed. Skipping the house payment became routine.

As 2010 started, California’s delinquency rate hit 13.8 percent, its cyclical peak by CoreLogic’s calculations. Yes, mid-recession nearly 1-in-7 California homeowners were skipping house payments. But at that same time, house hunter’s “affordability” as according to Realtor math was 50 percent — double today — and headed to the recent peak of 56 percent two years later.

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Tips for landlords going without rental income Seriously, who in 2010 had enough job security among the recessionary hangover to be a committed house hunter? Who’s credit score was high enough? And who could find a lender willing to lend?

Contrast that gloomy scenario to today’s “unaffordability” picture.

The state enjoys a hot job market with record-low unemployment and lenders who’ll lend on somewhat reasonable terms. A major push to home prices is too many workers with decent paychecks — and that’s a good thing — are chasing a limited number of homes to buy.

So in 2018, serious loan defaults and property auctions are a rarity. Mortgage-delinquency stats suggest that California housing is very “affordable” for owners as missed payments are at a 12-year low.

There’s a societal lesson here. Recall how bankers reacted to the “affordability” challenges of the early 2000s: By making mortgages way too easy to obtain.

In that era, like today, the traditional house hunter’s “afforbability” showed California housing as hypothetically “unaffordable.” The reality was that crazy lending of the early 2000s meant seemingly any adult with a pulse could be financed.

This flow of easy money — plus a decent job market — overheated home pricing as well as put unqualified, over-indebted owners into mortgages they could not “afford.” It was a classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for moment: improving “affordability” for buyers created “unaffordable” housing for owners.

That chapter of housing’s history ended badly. And it wasn’t just a California woe. Hordes of owners lost homes through foreclosure, creating massive economic pain across many industries and many parts of the globe.

I’m fully aware of the frustrations many California house hunters face shopping for a home in today’s high-cost environment. Yet poorly conceived fixes for housing “affordability” can have dire consequences.

Simple-to-get mortgages isn’t a solution. And building more homes can work wonders … but .. it also can lead to oversupply, an industry ailment that sunk the state’s housing market in the early 1990s.

The “affordability” riddle challenges too many house hunters. But it’s also encouraging to see that more Californian homeowners can “afford” to get that monthly check to the lender on time.

ICYMI …