Why buying a house in the US is so hard right now

We charted America’s homeownership problem.

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Homeownership in the US is basically synonymous with the idea of the American Dream. Owning your own home, the story goes, confers both self-determination and security — instead of paying a landlord, you own a growing asset that will form the base of your wealth. Homeownership is ingrained in US society; the majority of American adults are homeowners.

But somewhere along the line, something changed. Homeownership has been way less accessible to millennials and gen Z than it was to their parents, in part because of dwindling housing supply. But even within that generational disparity, 2023 was a uniquely bad year to try to become a new homeowner. Watch the video above to see exactly how bad, and why.

Sources and further reading:

The US Federal Reserve’s economic data was the basis for a lot of the charts in this video. Here’s median home prices: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
Here’s the homeowner vacancy rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RH...
And here’s mortgage rates: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MO...

The US Census provides historical median income data: https://www.census.gov/library/public...

The Urban Institute publishes a monthly housing chartbook, which is where we got some of the data on “price tiers” in active housing listings: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/f... (that particular data comes originally from realtor.com.)

Zillow’s “affordability index” comes from this dashboard. In the time since we finished this video, the affordability index has gotten even higher: https://www.zillow.com/research/under...


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