90% of Under-40 Americans Say Buying a Home Is Harder Than for Their Parents
Pew Research finds 89% of Americans under 40 say buying a home is harder than it was for their parents, as home values outpaced young-adult incomes more than 3-to-1 from 2019 to 2024.
A new Pew Research Center survey puts hard numbers on what the housing market has been signaling for years: the door to homeownership is closing on younger Americans. About nine-in-ten adults younger than 40 (89%) say it’s harder for young adults today to buy a home than it was for their parents’ generation, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
The affordability squeeze is not just a talking point. It is now reshaping demand across the entire residential ecosystem, from homebuilders to mortgage lenders to rental REITs.
The price-to-income gap has blown out
A new Pew Research Center analysis finds that from 2019 to 2024, inflation‑adjusted U.S. home values jumped 30% while incomes for households headed by adults under 40 rose just 9%.
The price‑to‑income ratio for young buyers is now 3.5, matching mid‑2000s bubble levels, and the modeled monthly payment on a median‑priced home is up about 64%. For context, back in 1975 a typical home cost about 2.4 times as much as the average under-40 household earned in a year. By 2019 that price-to-income ratio had risen to 2.9. In 2024 it reached 3.5.
Fewer renters can actually make the jump
In 2019, 56% of renter households under 40 could afford the monthly cost of owning a home, according to Pew, a share that had dropped to just 37% by 2024.
That is a structural demand problem for the housing complex, not a cyclical one. Young buyers are the marginal bid, and when they cannot clear, transaction volumes stall.
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Sentiment is shifting too
Younger adults are also less likely to think a home is a “very good investment”: 24% of under-40 Americans hold that view, versus 38% of those ages 60 and older, Pew found.
That is a notable psychological shift. If the next generation of buyers stops viewing a house as the default wealth-building vehicle, the long-run bid for single-family housing could soften even if rates come down.
Delinquencies are creeping higher
For those who did stretch to buy, cracks are appearing. With a rising share of new homebuyers overextending their budgets or accepting high mortgage rates just to close on a home, delinquencies are rising. The number of late mortgage payments more than 90 days past due rose 18.6% in December from a year earlier, according to a survey published earlier this year by VantageScore, a credit scoring agency—a faster increase than for delinquencies involving cars or credit card bills.
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Options market and stocks to watch
Watch for reactions across the housing complex if affordability data continues to deteriorate:
- DHI — D.R. Horton is the largest US homebuilder and is heavily exposed to first-time buyer demand.
- LEN — Lennar has leaned on mortgage rate buydowns to move product; watch margins.
- RKT — Rocket Companies is directly levered to origination volumes that stall when young buyers step back.
- Z — Zillow’s traffic and lead-gen business tracks transaction volumes closely.
- INVH — Invitation Homes and other single-family rental names may benefit if renters stay renters longer.
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