Meet me in St. Louis: I've seen the AHS data

From the announcement on today's joint HUD/Census release of 13 American Housing Survey metro data sets:

Median monthly housing costs in 2004 totaled $694 for homeowners and $593 for renters in the St. Louis metropolitan area. These costs amounted to 17 percent of the owners’ and 27 percent of the renters’ income.

Sounds nice. Sounds incredibly swooningly nice from this desk, which also happens to have on it a social service agency's referral list of San Francisco downtown flophouse rooms, many with bathroom down the hall, costing $125 to $200 per week. These are being recommended to very poor people as just about the cheapest unsubsidized rentals in San Francisco. By contrast with which the Post-Dispatch real estate classifieds make quite heavenly reading.

But about the AHS data -- It's available for the metro areas of Atlanta, Cleveland, Denver, Hartford, Indianapolis, Memphis, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, St. Louis, San Antonio, and Seattle. Lots of material available in big files at HUDUSER, other details in a big Census Dept. PDF (warning, the file is a honking 13.1 MB). Not the most accessibly presented data in the world but lots and lots of it.