The Household Ledger

One house, one Friday evening

Every essay in this season prices something in this picture. Keep scrolling and the frame will find each one in turn.

What does a year of Orthodox family life actually cost?

Every line of one household's year, priced in 269 communities.

Tuition comes in ahead of the mortgage in most of them, and the gap between the dearest community and the cheapest is wider than any single line on the bill.

In the picture: the lit rooms of the whole house.

What does it cost to set a Shabbos table every week, and to fill it with guests?

One Shabbat dinner for ten, priced course by course, then multiplied across the year.

A kosher Shabbat dinner runs close in scope to an American Thanksgiving, and a family that hosts half the year sets that table twenty-six times. The food alone runs to five figures.

In the picture: the table set for ten.

How much of the kosher premium is actually about being kosher?

A thirteen-item weekly basket, priced three ways in one town and then across five cities.

Across five cities the kashrut-driven part of the gap barely moves. The part that comes from geography and from where a family shops swings widely, and that is the part a household can act on.

In the picture: the food on the table.

In a large Orthodox family, which child is the expensive one?

The added cost of each additional child, community by community.

The early children share a room, a car and a tuition schedule that a community's institutions already absorb. The curve bends later than most families expect, and each community bends it in its own place.

In the picture: the bed under the eaves.

What does walking distance to a shul cost?

Home prices inside the eruv against the same homes outside it.

The premium runs between a tenth and a fifth of the price. The mature communities charge the most, and the fastest-growing ones compete on being affordable, which is what a rising premium shows that a high one cannot.

In the picture: the path from the front door.

Does the city tell you whether the neighborhood is safe?

Crime percentiles for Orthodox neighborhoods, against the reputations of their cities.

Reputation sorts communities about as well as a coin flip. Inside a single metro the Orthodox neighborhoods spread across nearly the whole national range, and several of the polished ones sit below the gritty ones.

In the picture: the lantern on the gatepost.

If a community is cheaper, does it pay you less?

Pay for six professions in every metro in the country, against the local price level.

The best-paying market pays about one and eight tenths times the worst for identical work, and cost of living eats most of that difference before it reaches the household.

In the picture: the desk in the back room.

Where can a divorced Orthodox couple both afford to stay?

What two households on one income require, with the children still in day school.

Forty-one communities ranked on what that arrangement actually asks of a family, rather than on what a single household pays to live there.

In the picture: the house next door.

When the tuition bill ends, where is the best place to grow old?

Communities ranked for the years after the tuition bill ends.

A retiree-weighted index across the Orthodox world, with an audit of the amenities that start to matter once the school run stops. South Florida sweeps the top of the table.

In the picture: the main bedroom.

Is the frum world sorting by politics?

Where Jewish communities moved, set against where the rest of America moved.

Orthodox families are said to be leaving blue states for red ones. The community's own numbers put the move in exactly one place, and where it happens it runs on cost.

In the picture: the roofline and the sunset behind it.

Then put your own numbers in

Four instruments run the same arithmetic on a household you describe: the map, the comparison table, the scorecard, and the thirty-year trail.