A similar proportion of people are buying houses, but they’re paying far more relative to their income than used to be the case. People are stretching their budget more.
Interestingly your link seems to blame it mostly on declining marriage rates? It says near the end that the majority of the decline in individual homeownership rate since 1990 can be accounted for by assuming the marriage rate stayed constant, rather than the noted decline in marriages we’ve seen since then. So I’m not convinced things actually were better in the 90s; couples were just getting married younger and more often, and the pooled resources allowed more of them to buy homes.
A similar proportion of people are buying houses, but they’re paying far more relative to their income than used to be the case. People are stretching their budget more.
People are also buying later than used to be the case. “Starter homes” aren’t a thing anymore. People are buying in their mid-career after saving a ton of money up. https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/real-homeownership-gap-between-todays-young-adults-and-past-generations-much-larger-you
Just referencing the homeownership rate alone ignores the important context.
Interestingly your link seems to blame it mostly on declining marriage rates? It says near the end that the majority of the decline in individual homeownership rate since 1990 can be accounted for by assuming the marriage rate stayed constant, rather than the noted decline in marriages we’ve seen since then. So I’m not convinced things actually were better in the 90s; couples were just getting married younger and more often, and the pooled resources allowed more of them to buy homes.
Is that not the definition of better lol
But you can just look at the ballooning cost of homes, far outpacing wage growth, to see it’s mathematically inevitable that it’s worse.