If you’ve been on social media in the past ten years, you’ve surely seen it: The lamentation that it’s impossible for young adults in America today to buy a home of their own. It’s a complaint as likely to be offered by populist conservatives as by Taylor Lorenz-style progressives. The new right’s emphasis on family formation and declining fertility rates, in combination with the populist skew of young conservatives, has boosted the issue of housing costs in center-right circles.

In his speech at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit earlier this year, Tucker Carlson expressed the widely-held view that homeownership has become out of reach, to the detriment of family formation:

If you want a measure of how your economy is doing….my measure is really simple. I’ve got a bunch of kids. Can they afford houses with full-time jobs at like 27, 28? And the answer is no way. And the answer is that 35 year olds with really good jobs can’t afford a house unless they stretch and go deep into debt. And I just think that’s a total disaster….Nobody wants to raise their kids in an apartment. People do it because they have to. Nobody wants to. People want a little house, not some McMansion, just a little normal house. That is the actual American dream. And that is what is totally unattainable for young people.

However, there’s just one problem with blaming unaffordable homeownership for declining family formation: it gets the causality backwards.

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It’s clear that homeownership has declined among young adults. I turned to the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) to the Current Population Survey to look at the share of Americans ages 25-34 that were both homeowners and either a household head or the head’s spouse or partner.1 The data indicate that homeownership within this age group peaked in 1980 at 54 percent. By 2025, the share had fallen about 20 points to 35-36 percent.2

As an aside, this decline in homeownership was hardly confined to the young. Among adults ages 35-54, the homeownership rate that I calculated from the ASEC fell from 77 percent in 1980 (also the peak) to 60 percent in 2025. That 16.8-point drop is quite close to the 18.2-point drop among adults ages 25-34, though it is from a higher starting point.

Also clear is the fact that the share of Americans ages 25-34 that are married fell dramatically over this period—from 67 percent in 1980 to 37 percent in 2025. The question is whether the decline in the affordability of homeownership is responsible for the fall in family formation among young adults.

Most Young Newlyweds Have Always Been Renters

Let’s start by wiping the rose tint off the lens through which many view this question. Nostalgia about the halcyon past when homeownership and family formation went hand-in-hand is, as nostalgia tends to be, overly sunny. We can consider young first-time newlyweds using decennial census data and the American Community Survey (ACS). In 1960, among Americans under 35 years old who were one year into their first marriage (and still married), 83 percent were renters. As late as 1980, 70 percent were renters. As of 2023, 58 percent were renting—still a majority.3

If we look at first-time parents under 35 who are married and have a child under two years old, the share who rent tends to be lower than among young newlyweds. But renting was still the norm for new parents during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1960, 69 percent of young, married new parents rented their home. By 1970, it was still 65 percent. Only by 1980 had it fallen to a minority (47 percent). Today it’s 35 percent. If we include single parents, 49 percent of young first-time parents are renters.

That newlyweds and new parents are more likely to be homeowners today than in the past doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s become easier for young adults to own a home. If it really has become more difficult to own a home, we might see less marriage and fewer parents but more homeownership among the advantaged few who do marry or have kids. But the numbers do reveal that it’s simply a myth that most people in the mid-twentieth century delayed marriage and parenthood until they could buy a home. When the oldest boomers became first-time parents in the 1960s and 1970s, they were more likely to be renters than homeowners.

Nor do these figures suggest that it’s become harder for young married couples to afford a home after getting married but before having children. Subtracting the newlywed estimates from the new-parent ones, in 1980 there was a 23 percentage-point difference in homeownership. In 2023, the difference was also 23 points.

Let’s also say it again: a majority of young newlyweds and a third of new married parents today are renters; many young adults continue to marry and have children despite not owning a home.

Homeownership among Young Married Couples and among Young Single Adults Has Declined Modestly or Not at All

Homeownership trends for young adults look decidedly less dire if we take account of the decline in marriage. A simple way to do that is to separate out single and married Americans ages 25-34. I show these trends in the figure below, going all the way back to 1900 using decennial census and ASEC data.

Source: Decennial census public use microdata (1900-1980) and Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey (1976-2025). University of Minnesota, www.ipums.org. Cohabiting partners of household heads are excluded from the analyses; other cohabiting partners are counted as single renters. Adults who are married but with an absent spouse or who are separated are also excluded. The “all” trend includes everyone regardless of marital status or cohabitation arrangements.

Note, first, the trend for single young adults (the bottom lines). Simply put, it has never been the case that a large share of single young people has been able to afford homeownership. Not when marriage was common, not when it was rare. To be young and a homeowner is generally to be married, and that has always been true.

That said, homeownership among single young adults rose steadily through 1980 and has remained elevated since. Homeownership has not declined relative to past generations. That’s the opposite of what we’d expect to see if home affordability were declining.

Turning to young married couples (the top lines), we see that a majority have been homeowners since the 1950s. The homeownership rate did decline after 1980, but by much less than the overall homeownership rate (the middle lines). The overall homeownership rate fell from 54 percent in 1980 to 35-36 percent in 2025, or by about a third. (The calculation is 1 – 35.5/53.7.) Among married couples, homeownership only fell from 71 percent to 59 percent. That 17 percent decline was about half as large as the overall homeownership trend suggests.

As recently as 2023, 63 percent of young married couples were homeowners. That was the same as in 1983 and only 3 percentage points lower than at the height of the 2000s housing bubble. The 2023 rate was also higher than in any year through 1970 and any year from 1985 to 1999.

Most of the decline among young married adults occurred between 1980 and 1983, due in large part to high interest rates that Federal Reserve Board Chair Paul Volcker imposed to arrest runaway inflation. That rate hike made mortgages costlier and also induced a deep recession. Homeownership among young married couples never recovered, though for the most part, it remained above 1970 levels.

The relatively high homeownership rate around 1980, like the subsequent peak during the pre-financial-crisis housing bubble, may be an unrealistic benchmark. In part, it reflected the interaction of the sustained high inflation of the 1970s with tax policy, which reduced the cost of owning relative to renting. That said, in the current inflationary environment, this relative cost of owning is even lower than it was in the 1970s.4

One might object to my separating out married young adults on the grounds that perhaps they became a more elite group over time, which could prop up the trend. However, if we look at the 56 percent of married young adults in 1980 with less than one year of college and compare them with the 51 percent of married young adults in 2025 with less than a bachelor’s degree, the drop in homeownership was from 68 percent to 54 percent instead of from 71 percent to 59 percent (a 21 percent drop instead of a 17 percent drop).

Simply put, married couples are in a better position than single young adults to afford a home and always have been. A big reason for the 18-percentage-point drop in young adults’ home ownership rate is the massive 30-point fall in marriage. For purposes of affording a down payment or a mortgage, sharing expenses and pooling incomes have always been important. Indeed, if we look just at those young married couples with two earners, the drop in homeownership has been even smaller than the decline for young married couples generally. It fell from 72 percent in 1980 to 62 percent in 2025 (and was 67 percent in 2023).

It’s Not Clear the Age of First-Time Homebuyers Has Increased

According to the National Association of Realtors, the median age of homebuyers has risen over time, from 31 in 1981 to 59 by 2025. Among first-time homebuyers that increase has been smaller, but still from 29 to 40 years old. However, according to a second data source, from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY), the median age of first-time homebuyers declined from 2000 to 2024, from 38 to 36 years old, even though the NAR estimates rise from 32 to 38 years old over this period. The FRBNY estimates come from a large sample of credit reports, while the NAR results are from a relatively small survey with low response rates.

Unfortunately, the FRBNY data do not go further back in time, so we don’t know what they would show for 1981. We do know that from 1981 to 2000, the NAR estimates for first-time buyers increase from 29 to 32 years old. If the FRBNY age estimates also would have risen 3 years over this period, the 1981 to 2000 change would be from a median age of 35 to 38 years old, and the change over the entire 43 years would be from 35 to 36 years old.

Even using the NAR estimates, the increase from 1981 to 2021 for first-time buyers was only from 29 to 33. Indeed, the NAR data indicate that in the four years from 2021 to 2025, the median age rose by 7 years—nearly twice as much as over the preceding 40 years. To the extent this data is accurate (despite clear reasons to prefer the FRBNY data) the jump after 2021 probably was initially due to rising home prices. That increase stemmed from the Federal Reserve Board’s large purchase of mortgage-backed securities during the COVID-19 pandemic and the broader post-pandemic inflation. When the Fed increased interest rates to rein in that inflation, it caused a jump in mortgage rates, making homebuying even more unaffordable.

If the NAR data are right, the rise in median age of homebuyers was modest until very recently, suggesting that if the cost of homeownership has been a barrier to marriage, it has been so mainly for the past 4 years rather than the past 45 years. If the NYFRB data are right, any increase in median age of homebuyers had stopped by 2000, and it’s likely to have changed little over 45 years.

Home Sale Prices Have Risen Relative to Incomes, But Not as Much as It Might Appear

As evidence of an affordability crisis facing young adults, Patrick Brown of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and others have pointed to the rise in the median sale price of homes sold relative to median household income. Brown cites an increase in that ratio from something like 3.6 in the mid-1980s to around 5.3 by 2023. I combined my own ASEC figures using family income (including cohabiting couples as families) with the same median home price data used by Brown. I get a similar result, finding a rise in median home price to median income from 3.8 in 1980 to 5.4 in 2024.

Certainly, one reason for this increase is that the supply of homes that are affordable to young adults has diminished with the spread of land use and zoning regulations. This factor is especially important in particular metropolitan areas and regions of the country. But it doesn’t seem to be the most important one for understanding national affordability trends among young adults. If we divide median home sales price by the median family income of married adults ages 25-34, that ratio rises between 1980 and 2025—but only from 2.9 to 3.5. The typical home seems only a little more out of reach for young married couples than it used to be.5

The Cost of Buying a Home Has Risen Less Than Home Prices (And Pay)

It’s useful to think of the cost of homeownership as comprising the cost of buying a home and the cost of living in a home. The initial cost involves the various amounts paid at closing, as well as the down payment. (Note that a down payment really is just a transfer of assets from, say, a checking account to real estate, though of course one must initially have enough assets to transfer.) When we combine data on down payment amounts with sales price data, we find that this part of the cost of buying a home has risen by less than sales prices. I have located data only back to 1990, but from then to 2019, while the median sales price of homes sold rose by 162 percent, down payments rose only 73 percent.6 For comparison, the nominal (non-inflation-adjusted) hourly wages of private production and nonsupervisory workers—a common measure of the typical worker’s hourly pay—rose 130 percent over the same period. Other research (see Figure 5) indicates that the average down payment as a share of home price increased slightly among first-time homebuyers between 1980 and 1990, suggesting that if I could extend my analysis back to 1980 it would tell the same story.

The bottom line is that home prices outpaced wages, but down payments did not. The result supports the importance of declining marriage in explaining falling homeownership: it’s not that down payments have become more expensive, or even that they’ve become more expensive relative to wages; it’s that fewer people can afford a down payment because they are not combining their wages with a spouse’s income.

The cost of living in a home is more complicated, but mortgage interest is the largest expense for most homeowners with a mortgage. Those rates fell steadily until the past 4 years and were 71 percent lower in 2019 than in 1980.7 Even after the recent spike, the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage interest rate was 51 percent lower in 2024 than in 1980.

Moreover, rising home values increase the value of home equity for existing homeowners, and this increase constitutes income (or a negative cost) in the form of accrued capital gains. Rising home prices also increase the value of the “service flow” from not having to pay rent to a landlord for the roof over one’s head, another form of income. While they will also tend to increase the cost of property taxes and homeowner’s insurance, the relative cost of living in an owned home versus renting is lower today than in 1980 (Figure 6).8

Young Men Are As Marriageable As In the Past

Adjacent to claims that the inability to afford a home is behind declining marriage rates is the assertion that men have become less “marriageable” than in the past—that they are economically worse off. If men are less marriageable today, that would make them less able to afford a home, which would lead to less marriage.

In past research, I tested this assertion by defining “marriageability” as a fixed percentile (the median or the 25^th percentile) of the earnings distribution of married fathers ages 25-29 in 1979 who were sole earners. Young men whose inflation-adjusted income clears this threshold are marriageable by this definition, since half to three-quarters of sole-earner married fathers of the same age were making at least that much 45 years ago.

I found that in 2020 men were either more marriageable than in 1979 (using a higher marriageability threshold) or modestly less marriageable (using a lower threshold). In ongoing analyses that treat non-workers differently and use an improved price index to adjust earnings for inflation, I find that young men are unambiguously more marriageable than in 1979. In another recent paper that uses these improved methods, I report that median earnings of men ages 25-29 rose 21 percent from 1973 to 2023 after adjusting for inflation and 25 percent from 1989 to 2023. (Not incidentally, median earnings among young women rose 60 percent from 1973 to 2023. No marriageability problem there.)

Claims that Many Young Adults Delay Marriage or Family Formation Until They Can Buy a Home, Thus Explaining the Decline in Marriage, Are Invariably Anecdotal

I searched the massive Roper Center iPoll public opinion archive (subscription required) for polling questions that directly ask people whether they are delaying marriage or childbearing until they can afford to buy a home. There is plenty of evidence that many people would like to own a home but can’t afford to buy one. There is plenty of evidence that many married couples would like to start a family or expand their family but cannot afford to do so and that many people would like to get married but can’t afford it. These questions on family formation and marriage tend to find that sizable minorities of people who have not achieved their family goals cite financial concerns.

For instance, an especially relevant survey conducted this past fall indicated that 27 percent of adults ages 18-28 who did not own their own home but wished to be a homeowner said they were delaying getting married or formalizing a long-term partnership until they could afford to buy a home.9 Of course, this is one side of the question—we don’t know how many homeowners in this age group did buy a home before having children or how many are renting but didn’t delay having children.

More importantly, there is essentially no trend evidence that such perceptions or preferences have changed over the long run. Is that 27 percent of young renters delaying marriage higher or lower than in the past? In theory, it could be at an all-time low, which would hardly be consistent with the claim that fewer people are marrying because of falling home affordability.

Nor did I find any contemporary evidence about the share of young adults who will only marry once they can afford a home. Invariably, when people claim that so many young adults won’t marry until they can afford to buy a home that it has produced a large decline in marriage, it’s simply an assertion or justified with anecdotes.

Conclusion

It matters a lot for important questions of policy which is closer to the truth: economic factors, such as the cost of homeownership, are depressing marriage; or falling marriage is making it harder to afford major purchases, such as buying a home. Many people agree with venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who believes that the cultural resentments of young adults are rooted in housing affordability. Theil recently offered that

I think you can reduce 80 percent of culture wars to questions of economics—like a libertarian or a Marxist would—and then you can reduce maybe 80 percent of economic questions to questions of real estate. It’s extremely difficult these days for young people to become homeowners.

If the decline in marriage and other aspects of social breakdown—from political polarization to widespread loneliness to falling social trust—have economic causes, it may be possible to identify villains at fault (neoliberal politicians or corporate elites), taxes to cut, subsidies to increase, and regulations to tweak. Problem solved.

However, if the decline in marriage is more to do with cultural change—with shifting preferences or other nebulous societal trends—economic fixes won’t do (and we may need to collectively look in the mirror to assign blame).

I’ll close by noting one group of young adults for whom homeownership has plummeted—married couples with one earner. Their homeownership rate fell from 70 percent in 1980 (about the same as for two-earner married couples) to just 49 percent in 2025. That was lower than in 1970 (65 percent) and even in 1960 (60 percent).

Arguably, these families have been hurt by the greater purchasing power that dual-earner families command, which leaves them at a financial disadvantage when looking for family-friendly homes. The evidence reinforces a conclusion I have made elsewhere: it is difficult for one earner to afford what two earners can buy, and the increase in dual-earner families has left sole-earner families feeling worse off. Indeed, due to housing supply restrictions, it’s possible that sole-earner families are actually worse off than they’d otherwise have been if not for the popularity of the dual-earner model, at least in regards to homeownership.

This nostalgia for the sole breadwinner model seems to be behind much of the new right’s economic agenda. But the share of young adults pursuing the one-earner model was already small by 1980. According to decennial census data, in 1960, married people ages 25-34 in one-earner couples were 52 percent of all young adults, and they were 41 percent in 1970. By 1980, according to the ASEC, that was down to 22 percent, falling further to just 10 percent in 2025. That drop partly reflected the decline in marriage, but even among married young adults, the share in one-earner couples fell from 62 percent in 1960 to 50 percent in 1970 to 31 percent in 1980 and 25 percent in 2025.

It’s unlikely that this decline in the one-earner model reflects increased economic difficulty. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the patterns of increased employment among married women are similarly impressive among those with more and less educational attainment, those with husbands who have more and less educational attainment, and those with higher- and lower-earning husbands. The rise in labor force participation among women baby boomers was preceded by an increase in their educational attainment. These trends long predate any slowdown in wage growth among men, and they occur across the rich world (see Figure 5.1). As the opportunity cost of keeping one spouse out of the workforce has risen, fewer families have done so.

The culture has changed as the nation has become richer. We would do well to recognize that, to accept (or not accept) the trade-offs that our collective choices have produced, and to stop squinting for signs of long-run economic deterioration to wash the reality of these complicated cultural changes away. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to increase incomes or lower housing costs. But it does mean we should perhaps worry less about those things and more about social breakdown.