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Epic Economist, 6/25/26
"You'll Never Own a Home in America, Here’s Why"
"The math stopped adding up sometime around 2021. A house that cost four years of income now costs eight and the gap is the whole story. I went looking for the moment American homeownership broke, and I kept hitting the same wall: the inventory. There are roughly 700,000 homes for sale in a country that needs millions more. Builders never recovered from 2008, and the ones they do put up are bigger, pricier, aimed at the buyer who already owns. So the shortage isn't an accident of the market. It's the foundation everything else is built on. Then I traced where your money actually goes.
On a 30-year loan at today's rates, you don't pay for the house first, you pay the bank first. For the opening decade, the overwhelming share of every check is interest, not equity. I ran the numbers on a median home and watched the borrower hand a lender more in interest than the original price of the house. You're not buying a home. You're renting money, and the rent is brutal. Now layer in wages. Adjusted for what things actually cost, the typical paycheck has barely moved in 40 years while home prices ran off the chart. I overlaid the two lines and the divergence is almost violent , productivity climbing, pay flat, prices vertical. When I stacked rent against a mortgage payment in most major metros, renting came out cheaper month-to-month. Which means the people calling renters irresponsible have the math exactly backwards. That's the part that reframes everything: the system isn't failing to put young people into homes, it's working precisely as designed to keep them out.
The median first-time buyer is now pushing 40. A generation that did everything right is being filtered out one credit decision at a time, and the lever that decides it is a three-digit number most people never learn to control. So I dug into that number, the credit score, because it's the one variable in this whole machine you can still move. And below that score sits a bigger question I'm still chasing: who decided a country could price its own children out of the ground they were born on?"
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