Is the Housing Affordability Crisis Becoming a Generational Wealth Fight?

Jasmyn Carter thought she had done what prospective homebuyers are supposed to do.

She had a good debt-to-income ratio, she paid her student loans, and by 2022, she had saved $30,000 in cash toward a home.

Then she started home shopping.

Carter, whose family has lived in Texas for eight generations, told Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico at an Oct. 14 CNN town hall that when she went house hunting, a family from California put an additional $80,000 down in cash.

“We cannot afford a house,” she told him.

Talarico said he was hearing the same frustration from young Texans who had been promised that working hard, going to school, and playing by the rules would deliver the American dream.

“That was a lie,” he said.

Carter countered: “It’s a nightmare.”

With the Nov. 3 midterms just days away, new polling suggests that frustration is rippling across how young Americans see their economic future.

The Harvard Youth Poll reported on Oct. 22 that, for the first time in its history, Americans aged 18 to 29 are more likely to expect to be financially worse off than their parents—27% to 25%. Two years ago, optimism led pessimism by 8 percentage points.

One generation's housing wealth is another's price of admission

That negative sentiment is shared across generations. Nearly 9 in 10 registered voters want Democrats and Republicans in Congress to work together to make housing more affordable, according to an April Bipartisan Policy Center/Advocus survey.

But the harder question is what “affordable” should mean—and for whom.

Housing makes that question especially difficult to answer because it's both a necessary expense and an asset—compare that to a lower grocery bill, which is just cheaper.

A lower home price, meanwhile, also means someone else's asset—and often, their greatest source of wealth—is worth less.

And the generations enter that conflict from very different positions.

Just 24% of adults aged 18 to 29 owned their homes in 2025, according to the Federal Reserve, compared with 83% of adults 60 and older. Among homeowners, median home equity was $90,000 for those under 35 in 2022, compared with $250,000 for those 65 and older.

Some of that gap reflects age: Older households have had more time to let their equity grow. But today's younger households also face a worse entry point.

From 2019 to 2024, inflation-adjusted home values rose 30% while incomes for households headed by someone under 40 rose 9%. Over that period, the share of renter households under 40 earning enough to afford the monthly cost of a typical home fell from 56% to 37%.

And once accumulated, housing wealth can become an advantage in the next purchase. Repeat buyers put a median of 23% down in 2025, compared with 10% for first-time buyers, and 30% of repeat buyers paid entirely in cash.

It can cross generations, too: 26% of younger millennial buyers received down payment help through a gift or loan from a relative or friend, according to the National Association of Realtors®.

So the divide is not literally old versus young. It's between households already connected to housing wealth and those trying to enter the system without it—a divide that maps heavily onto age and can be reinforced by what families have available to pass down.

That leaves policymakers trying to solve two problems at once: Help younger households acquire the asset without eroding the wealth older households have accumulated in it.

“From a home price perspective, these goals are incompatible,” explains Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com®. “Prices can't both go up for existing homeowners and down for prospective ones.”

An August working paper from economists Joshua Coven, Sebastian Golder, Arpit Gupta, and Abdoulaye Ndiaye shows just how complex delivering relief is.

The researchers found that lower property taxes make homes cheaper for existing owners to hold, but some of the benefit can become capitalized into higher prices while giving older owners more reason to stay put.

In their model, raising California property taxes to Texas levels lowered prices and required down payments while increasing holding costs for older owners. Young homeownership rose; elderly homeownership fell.

The generation with more housing wealth also has more electoral weight

That same economic conflict is reinforced at the ballot box.

More than 6 in 10 people aged 50 and older voted in the 2022 midterms, according to AARP, compared with roughly 3 in 10 people younger than 30. An October survey across 43 competitive congressional districts found 83% of voters 50 and older were extremely motivated to vote, compared with 66% of those under 50.

Affordability is motivating older voters, too. AARP found rising prices and affordability were their top concern in those districts.

But affordability looks different once someone owns the asset.

“The ancillary costs of homeownership are more impactful on existing [homeowners] than home asking prices or current mortgage rates,” Berner says.

Property taxes, insurance premiums, and HOA fees can make a home more expensive to keep even as the owner accumulates equity. Slowing those costs can help incumbent owners, Berner says, although there remains a risk that some of the savings eventually become reflected in higher home values.

The same relief can mean different things for different generations

Voters of all ages will be weighing that confluence of immediate and knock-on effects across the country in November.

In Florida, voters will consider Amendment 3, which would, among other changes, expand the state's homestead exemption for nonschool property taxes.

An AIF Center for Political Strategy poll conducted by McLaughlin & Associates found 36% support among voters younger than 30, compared with 55% among voters older than 40. A separate Mason-Dixon survey found a smaller gap in the same direction: 48% support among voters aged 18 to 34 versus 56% among those 65 and older.

Of course, those polls don't explain why voters split by age. But they're telling in a state where the economics of ownership already depend on when someone entered the market.

In Miami, the owner of a newly purchased median-valued home would pay about $10,024 a year in property taxes, according to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Someone who bought an equally valuable home in 2012 would pay just $3,166, largely because assessment limits restrict how quickly taxable values rise for existing owners.

Even so, NAR estimates that Amendment 3's tax savings could move roughly 40,000 additional renter households under 45 above its income-qualification threshold for a starter home.

It's a clear illustration of why the generational conflict is so difficult to untangle.

California's Proposition 37, meanwhile, starts from the other end. It would authorize up to $25 billion in revenue bonds for loans covering as much as 17% of the purchase price of qualifying newly constructed homes. Participating homeowners would repay the loans.

“Every day, we hear from middle-class Californians who simply want a fair shot at homeownership for themselves and their families—but affordability continues to stand in the way,” California Association of Realtors President Tamara Suminski told Realtor.com in October. “By providing down payment assistance loans—at no cost to taxpayers—this measure tackles one of the biggest barriers and brings the dream of homeownership closer to reality.”

Lawmakers are promising both generations can win

President Donald Trump has stated that goal explicitly.

At a January Cabinet meeting, Trump said he wanted to make homes easier to buy without reducing the wealth existing homeowners had accumulated.

“I don't want those values to come down,” he said. He later argued that lower interest rates could “keep the values up for the people that have housing and let other people buy housing.”

Berner agrees lower mortgage rates would quickly improve first-time-buyer affordability. But stronger demand would likely push prices higher, he says, eroding some of the gain.

“The longer answer is housing supply growth and income growth,” he says.

Income growth offers the least direct conflict among generations. If earnings rise faster than inflation and home prices, prospective buyers gain purchasing power without requiring existing owners to lose equity.

Supply attacks the other side of the equation by reducing scarcity—but its success can make the trade-off more visible.

“As far as proven results, Austin, TX, is a great example of supply responding quickly to demand, especially in the new-construction starter segment,” Berner says. “However, home price softness in the metro is illustrative of the trade-off for existing homeowners.”

He also points to Montana, which is trying to make that supply response easier, with reforms allowing more accessory dwelling units, multifamily development, and other forms of housing that Berner says could create more starter inventory.

The two routes suggest the generational goals are not completely irreconcilable. But Carter’s experience points to one more complication: Affordability is relative.

Remember that California family who put down an additional $80,000 in cash? They weren’t alone.

California Policy Lab research found San Francisco Bay Area movers landed in neighborhoods where home values were about 50% lower than those they left, and became homeowners at higher rates.

So a buyer priced out of one market may become the stronger bidder in another—shifting affordability pressure rather than eliminating it.