What’s in an Area Median Income?

A lot. Maybe even too much.

The area median income of a community, known also as the AMI, is one of those metrics that carries a lot of weight in the housing policy world. It’s also one of the most powerful acronyms used by state and county housing organizations to determine whether or not a resident (and their family) can access housing opportunities.

Damien Chang, a policy fellow with Housing Hawai‘i’s Future, has spent a lot of time breaking down AMI’s importance to housing attainability for residents in the islands. Often, AMI is all that stands between residents and housing opportunities.

For many of Hawai‘i’s middle-income residents (those making between 80% and 140% of their community’s AMI), using AMI to gauge one’s qualifications for housing can be ineffective and incomplete. “Reliance on AMI as the primary yardstick for affordability exposes a critical mismatch between what Hawai‘i families earn and what homes cost,” Damien warns. “Even with recent wage growth, many households find themselves priced out of the market, illustrating how static income thresholds cannot keep pace with real economic pressures.”

In his August 2025 research brief, Damien examines potential alternatives to AMI as a metric for qualifying residents to access certain rental and owner-occupied housing opportunities.

To get a sense of where Damien’s research has evolved, Housing Hawai‘i’s future has additionally published a summary of Damien’s brief. His findings suggest that housing programs reliant on AMI need more flexibility. Hawai‘i needs to find better ways to assess housing attainability for Hawai‘i’s residents. Metrics should not make destiny.