Five times your income

To buy the median home in America — about $412,500 — you need to earn roughly $126,700 a year.[1]

The typical American household earns $80,610.[3]

Sit with that gap for a second. It isn't a rounding error or a high-cost-coast problem. It's the middle of the country against the middle of the market: the median family is about forty-six thousand dollars short of the median house.

It didn't used to be like this. For most of the postwar era a home cost roughly three times what a household made. By 2019 it was 4.1 times. In 2024 it crossed five.[1]

The usual story blames mortgage rates and tells you to wait. Rates spiked, houses got "expensive," and when rates come back down affordability comes back. I don't buy it. Prices are up about 60 percent since 2019.[1] A point or two off the mortgage doesn't undo that — and cheaper borrowing tends to do the opposite of help, because it hands every buyer more to bid with and the extra mostly lands in the price.

The rate is what changed last year. The price-to-income ratio changed over a generation, and it isn't waiting on the Fed.

It's not just buyers

Buying is only half the story. The other half is the people who already gave up on it.

Half of American renters — 22.6 million households — now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. That 30 percent line is the one economists use to mark a household as "cost-burdened," the point where rent starts crowding out everything else. It used to describe a struggling minority. As of 2023 it describes the median renter.[1]

And 12.1 million of them spend more than half of everything they earn just to keep the lights on and the door locked.[1]

It climbed the income ladder

Here's the part that should bother people who think this isn't their problem. The burden moved up. Among renters making $45,000 to $75,000 — solidly middle — the cost-burdened share has doubled since 2001, to 45 percent.[1] And it crossed the line into ownership, too: nearly a quarter of homeowners, the people who supposedly already won, are now stretched on the house they hold.[1]

Builders ran the same math from the buying side. About 75 percent of U.S. households can't afford a median-priced new home.[2] Three out of four. That's not a market with a soft spot. It's a market most people have been shown the exit from.

The missing middle

There's a quiet mechanism under all of it. We didn't just make housing pricey. We deleted the cheap kind. Apartments renting for under $1,000 a month fell from 24.8 million in 2013 to 17.2 million in 2023 — about 7.6 million units, gone in a decade.[1] Some got renovated upmarket, some got torn down, almost nothing got built to replace them. When the bottom of the market disappears, the people who lived there don't. They move up into your price bracket and bid.

Who's in the room

The fix is almost boring. Build more, especially the modest middle — duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings, the kind of housing that's quietly illegal to build on most residential land in the country. This isn't really a left-or-right fight; you can find economists across the spectrum who agree on the supply story. It's a local fight. And it dies in city council chambers and zoning hearings, one "not here" at a time.

Look at who's actually in those rooms. The homeowner whose property value is on the line shows up. The renter working two jobs, the priced-out 28-year-old, the family that would move in if the project got approved — they're not there. The meeting is at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday, and they were never going to hear about it.

That's the gap that keeps the other gap open. The people with the most at stake in the housing math have the least say in the decisions that set it.

It's part of why a project like ours starts with housing instead of something safer. Not because we have the answer — the answer is mostly "build," and that's a fight, not a feature. But this is exactly the kind of problem that breaks when the only people heard are the ones who can make the Tuesday meeting. You need a way to put the numbers, the evidence, and the people it lands on in the same place, and to weigh what they say by whether they're real and affected — not by who showed up.

A generation ago a house cost three years of work. Now it's five, and climbing, and most of the country has been quietly priced out of even arguing about it. The numbers aren't the crisis. The silence around them is.