The trajectory · purchasing power
Housing affordability: the deal got worse
The clearest measure of a fading American Dream is what a home costs relative to what people earn. Over three decades that ratio has climbed from about three times a year's median income to roughly five, near a record, and the age at which a typical person can first buy a home has drifted from the late twenties to forty. This is a slow, structural squeeze that spans every recent presidency; it is not any one administration's doing.
Median U.S. home price as a multiple of median household income. Higher means less affordable.
Median age of a first-time home buyer. In 2025, a record-low 21% of all buyers were first-timers.
Rates matter as much as prices, and this is nobody's single doing. The price-to-income ratio is one lens; the monthly cost of a home is driven as much by mortgage rates as by price. In 2021, rates near 2.65% briefly made homes more affordable despite high prices; the 2023–25 jump to around 7% is why the share of income needed to buy the median home hit a record ~47% even though the price ratio barely moved. The 2006 peak on the first chart was a bubble that then crashed; today's level is sustained. National figures also hide huge regional variation: coastal metros run 8–10× income while much of the Midwest is still near 3–4×. Above all, this is a decades-long, bipartisan trend driven by a housing-supply shortage, restrictive zoning, interest rates, and demographics: it climbs across administrations of both parties.