Why buying a house in the US is so hard right now

We charted America’s homeownership problem. This video is presented by Secret Deodorant. Secret doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make videos like this possible. Subscribe to our channel! http://goo.gl/0bsAjO Homeownership in the US is basically synonymous with the idea of the American Dream. Owning your own home, the story goes, confers both self-determination and security — instead of paying a landlord, you own a growing asset that will form the base of your wealth. Homeownership is ingrained in US society; the majority of American adults are homeowners. But somewhere along the line, something changed. Homeownership has been way less accessible to millennials and gen Z than it was to their parents, in part because of dwindling housing supply. But even within that generational disparity, 2023 was a uniquely bad year to try to become a new homeowner. Watch the video above to see exactly how bad, and why. Sources and further reading: The US Federal Reserve’s economic data was the basis for a lot of the charts in this video. Here’s median home prices: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS Here’s the homeowner vacancy rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHVRUSQ156N And here’s mortgage rates: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US The US Census provides historical median income data: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.html The Urban Institute publishes a monthly housing chartbook, which is where we got some of the data on “price tiers” in active housing listings: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2023-07/Housing%20Finance-%20At%20A%20Glance%20Monthly%20Chartbook%20July%202023.pdf (that particular data comes originally from realtor.com.) Zillow’s “affordability index” comes from this dashboard. In the time since we finished this video, the affordability index has gotten even higher: https://www.zillow.com/research/understanding-affordability-32538/ Vox.com is a news website that helps yo