The Real Cost of the Affordability Crisis
Responding to the Crisis of Eroded Social and Financial Capital
The affordability crisis facing younger generations is far more than vibes. Johann Kurtz’s recent viral essay confirms that they are indeed experiencing far more serious financial and social challenges compared to previous generations. Rather than being dismissed as the complaints of fragile young adults, these problems need to be acknowledged and addressed by families, policymakers, and mediating institutions—even in their decrepit state.
Kurtz’s central argument is that social capital—“trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam, and adults could be relied upon”—has eroded markedly for younger generations.
Fifty years ago, an American family could send its children to a free public school featuring a patriotic education, with children from mostly two-parent households and a shared culture. Now these schools are rife with woke curricula and enroll far more children from broken families. Once tightly-knit communities are becoming fractured due to historically high levels of immigration, as they break down into ethnic enclaves.
Social capital has deteriorated in substantial ways that aren’t captured by the ordinary economic measures such as GDP, unemployment levels, or the stock market. As former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency Eugene Ludwig noted in a Politico piece following President Trump’s second inauguration, we are looking at “a collection of economic indicators that all point in the same misleading direction”: they “shroud the reality faced by middle- and lower-income households.”
This points to the other pincer Kurtz highlights: the decreasing amount of financial capital younger generations have at their disposal. “Our current young, lacking access to this social capital,” he writes, “must engage in enormous outlays of purely financial capital in order to achieve the same levels of stability and accomplishment—capital that they do not have.”
The Reality Index confirms this point. A project of Grabien News, the index measures the gap between government statistics—notably the Consumer Price Index—and what families are actually paying. It now takes over $520 to buy goods and services that cost $100 in 1980, which is almost 34% higher than CPI over that same span of time. It also found that for at least the last 45 years, living a middle-class lifestyle—having a four-bedroom home, three kids, two cars—has tracked above the median family income, with an explosion in healthcare costs and the advent of the cell phone keeping that number high today.
But in other ways, younger generations today have it worse. Unlike in 1975, younger people can no longer pay for college by working for UPS over the summer. With skyrocketing prices on premium goods such as homes, education, and healthcare that far outpace wages, young adults are getting married later, buying homes later, and forming families later, if at all. Additionally, the falling quality of household appliances is another factor: a refrigerator from 1975 could still be running today, while one from today is guaranteed to be dead long before 2076.
This is not only a recipe for civilizational stagnation, but also a flashing warning light signaling future collapse.
Compare our current plight to that of the Silent Generation, 55% of which owned homes at age 30; only 33% of Millennials of that age can say the same. “The national ratio of median home price to median household income, which stood around 3.2 through the 1990s, reached 5.0 in 2024, nearly matching its all-time high,” Kurtz adds. And unsurprisingly, the age of first-time buyers has skyrocketed to 40 in 2025, up 11 years from the early ’80s.
A graph shared by the State Leadership Initiative captures this problem in a single snapshot: just around 15% of U.S. 30-year-olds are married and own a home—in 1950, it was over 50%. This is just one stat among many demonstrating that no matter what the think tank industrial complex may claim, young Americans as a whole are not doing as well as their forebears.
Kurtz points out that certain household goods such as TVs are far cheaper now than they once were relative to a regular middle-class wage, making “the young appear wealthy in the abstract.” But this is a mirage, because many Americans can no longer “afford anything meaningful.” The “goods that constitute a life—house, spouse, children, good school, good neighbors—have inflated so far beyond wages that the ordinary life path of 1965 now requires an extraordinary income,” Kurtz adds. This is why a raft of articles has claimed that it now takes far more income—ranging from $170,000 to well over $200,000 per year—to live a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle, especially in major metropolitan areas.
What Kurtz has put together tracks with the findings of American Compass’s Cost-of-Living Index. In 1985, a single man could support his family with only 40 weeks of income and devote the extra 20% to other expenses and savings. But in 2022, it would take 62 weeks for a man in the same situation to achieve that goal. Individual effort alone cannot overcome these structural shifts—shifts caused in part by political choices—that are causing young families to fall further and further behind.
When a box of Kirkland diapers now costs $50 at Costco, this signals that the economy is trending away from family formation, healthy communities, and the American Dream. Liquid modernity, a term coined by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, is dissolving the social compact, leaving younger generations poorer than previous ones.
There is good reason, then, why the issue of affordability is a rising one in our politics—and could allow the Democrats to retake the House (and even possibly the Senate) in the fall. Republicans in both the short and long term need to propose practical solutions, a task made harder with their focus on Iran and elsewhere.
If they don’t take the affordability crisis seriously, they’ll be back in the wilderness for at least a generation. A Democratic Party energized by a slate of young Democratic Socialists of America representatives will reap the benefits without offering meaningful fixes to stop the hemorrhaging.
None of the foregoing should be understood as a call for socialist redistribution or an apologia for living on the government dole. Generalizations that younger generations are lazy, soft, and whiners will not help. Neither will the claims that Boomers are selfish, petty, and uncaring about their families.
We must move away from instigating an intergenerational fight and instead forge an intergenerational compact in order to navigate these looming challenges together. Each side will have to make sacrifices to correct our current—and ultimately unsustainable—trajectory.
For younger families, this could mean buying smaller homes and finding ways to be a household that produces instead of merely consumes.
For parents, part of the solution could be moving closer to their kids and offering to babysit. It could also involve giving part of their children’s inheritances away earlier to help them prosper. As Justin Powell has counseled, this would treat financial resources “as something to be shepherded across generations, not hidden behind emotional walls or released only after the funeral.”
Politically, taking affordability seriously could entail backing away from property tax holidays that would primarily help older generations and lobbying for policy changes that could benefit working-class families, such as immigration enforcement. It could also involve dealing with the crushing debt accumulated by a suite of federal social benefit programs that essentially function as a massive wealth transfer from young to old.
Instead of generating more hostility, we need wisdom, patience, and bold strategy to navigate what will likely be the most consequential domestic political issue of the next 20 years.