In praise of Midwest real estate

You can own a home before 60. You just have to move to the middle of the country.

A for sale sign.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Anna Erastova/iStock, str33tcat/iStock, Library of Congress)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that American millennials can't afford to buy houses. Fully nine in 10 of this generation — the eldest of whom are now pushing 40 — want to own a home, but fewer than four in 10 do, a lower ownership rate than that of previous generations at the same age. There are plenty of explanatory factors here, and reasons like delayed marriage and high student loan burdens are not to be lightly dismissed. But at least as significant is the price of housing itself. "Nationally, the gap between income and home value has been rising," explains a recent report on millennial homeownership at The Atlantic, so much so that "it took nine years to save up a down payment in 1975. Now it takes 14."

But as the Atlantic story notes, that timeline isn't uniform nationwide. In coastal cities like Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., it takes around 30 years "to save up a 20 percent down payment on the median home in a given city by squirreling away 5 percent of the city's gross median income per year." The West Coast is even worse: You'd have to save for 40 years in San Francisco or 43 in Los Angeles. Your retirement party might be the first celebration in your own home, and with a 30-year mortgage, only those who make it to their 90s can expect to die debt-free.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.