Who is the housing market really failing? 

The industry's most urgent crisis isn't playing out in the seller's column — it's unfolding in the generation that hasn't bought a single home yet.

A recent Gallup poll found that nearly 9 in 10 Americans now believe buying a home is harder than ever. Not harder for a specific demographic. Not harder in certain markets. Simply harder than ever, broadly, and across the American public. 

The analysis below draws from key findings featured in HomeServices of America's recently released white paper, The Real American Housing Crisis – What's Happening to Our Future Homeowners?, which examines the affordability crisis through the lens of long-term market health.

Over the past several years, existing homeowners have benefited from one of the most extraordinary periods of wealth creation in modern housing history. National home values have appreciated 75 to 90% over the past decade, with total homeowner equity reaching $35 trillion. The average mortgage-holding homeowner is sitting on roughly $302,000 in equity. These are staggering numbers. They represent real financial security for millions of families, and that is genuinely good.

But it makes a current narrative — that sellers are somehow the primary parties being harmed in today's market — something difficult to square with the data. A market where sellers hold record equity, where baby boomers now account for 42% of all buyers and a dominant 55% of all sellers, is not a market in crisis for those on the selling side of the transaction.

A generation being priced out

The crisis, when the data is examined honestly, belongs to the buyers — and specifically to the buyers who haven't yet entered the market at all.

According to NAR's most recent research, households earning $75,000 a year — solidly middle class by any reasonable measure — can afford just 21% of home listings nationally. Before the pandemic, that same household could access almost 50% of all listings. The market has not merely tightened. For a wide swath of American earners, it has effectively closed.

The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies confirmed in its 2025 State of the Nation's Housing report that home sales have fallen to their lowest level in 30 years. Monthly mortgage payments on the median-priced home have more than doubled since 2020, from approximately $1,200 to over $2,500. The income required to responsibly carry that payment has nearly doubled as well — from under $70,000 to over $130,000.

These are barriers facing teachers, nurses, young professionals, dual-income households without generational wealth behind them and the adult children of renters — the people who have historically been the engine of first-time buyer activity in this country.

The aspirational collapse

Perhaps the most telling indicator of where the market is headed is not a price metric or an inventory figure. It is what future buyers believe about their own prospects, because as we all know, perception is more often than not reality.

Among non-homeowners aged 18 to 34 — the generation that has historically driven first-time buyer demand — the share expecting to purchase a home within five years has fallen by nearly half compared to a decade ago. 

The Gallup 2026 Economy and Personal Finance poll found that just 19% of all non-homeowners now believe they can buy within five years, a record low. For context, that figure was 41 to 49% as recently as 2013 to 2018.

These are not people who have given up on homeownership. They are people who have done the math and arrived at the rational conclusion that the near-term path is closed. That distinction matters enormously for the long-term health of the industry.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss these trends in greater depth with Mitch Robinson, with Real Estate News, including why I believe the industry's focus needs to shift from today's transactions to tomorrow's homeowners.

What equilibrium actually requires

The path back to a functioning, equitable housing market is not complicated to describe, but difficult to execute. It requires supply. It requires transparency. And it requires the industry to be honest about whose interests are actually being served by current market structures.

NAR's Housing Mismatch Report, published in March 2026, found that the national Listing-Income Alignment Score — a measure of how well the distribution of available homes matches what households at various income levels can actually afford — sits at 74.9%, still nearly 10 percentage points below its pre-pandemic baseline. 

A call for redirected urgency

Everyone who is buying or selling matters in our industry, but we need to find the mechanisms to support the crucial future buyer. 

They are the industry's future transaction volume, its future clients and the next generation of homeowners whose equity will, in 20 years, be the foundation of a new cycle of wealth creation. An industry that fails to advocate for their access to the market is, in a very real sense, undermining its own future.

Go deeper: The full data behind the crisis

The trends outlined here represent the surface of a far more complex story. HomeServices' comprehensive white paper, The Real American Housing Crisis – What's Happening to Our Future Homeowners?, delivers the in-depth analysis that every industry leader, policymaker and housing advocate needs to see. Inside, you'll find a comprehensive look at the generational wealth gap created by delayed homeownership, a data-driven examination of how the affordability crisis falls hardest on minority households and a frank assessment of the structural forces — from rate lock-in to inventory constraints — that are closing the door on the next generation of buyers.