By Billy the Broker (I just want to stay anonymous)
If you’re wondering why your college-educated offspring are still camped out in their childhood bedrooms at 30, blame the numbers, not their work ethic. The housing market has become a rigged casino where the house always wins—and the house costs $700,000.
Senior Associate at John Burns Research & Consulting Jack Kelley’s recent piece on entry-level buyers hit me like a cold slap of reality. Here’s a young man in San Diego—a guy who works in housing development—wondering if he’ll ever own a home. When the people helping developers build houses can’t afford to buy them, we’ve officially entered the Twilight Zone of real estate.
The arithmetic is unforgiving and undeniable. In San Diego, you need to earn $225,000 just to qualify for an “entry-level” home. That’s 12 percent of buyers, down from 39 percent in 2020. Translation: we’ve priced out nearly 90 percent of potential homeowners in just four years.
But here’s what the consultants and economists miss while they’re busy charting demographic trends and financing innovations: this isn’t just a housing crisis, it’s a generational betrayal. We—the parents, the policymakers, the NIMBY warriors—have systematically destroyed the American Dream for our own children. We’ve turned housing from shelter into speculation, from necessity into an investment commodity.
The kids know it, too. Seventy-six percent of Gen Z still want to own homes, according to Kelley’s data. They’re not asking for McMansions with three-car garages. They’ll take the cottage without parking, the condo with shared walls, the house on the suburban fringe. They just want what every previous generation took for granted: a place to call their own.
So what are we doing about it? We’re innovating around the edges—smaller footprints, creative financing, dual-primary layouts for roommate living. These aren’t solutions; they’re Band-Aids on a severed artery. When your fix for unaffordable housing is designing homes for people who need roommates at 35, you’re not solving the problem, you’re institutionalizing it.
The real solution requires admitting an uncomfortable truth: we caused this mess with decades of shortsighted policies designed to protect our own property values at our children’s expense. Every height restriction, every parking minimum, every “community character” objection has been a brick in the wall that now separates young adults from homeownership.
Builders are trying—God bless them—but they’re playing an impossible game. You can’t innovate your way out of a supply shortage created by regulation. When it takes five years and $200,000 in fees just to get permission to build affordable housing, the word “affordable” becomes a cruel joke.
The suburbs offer cheaper land, but what good is a $300,000 house in the middle of nowhere when all the jobs are in the expensive cities? It’s like offering someone a great deal on a boat when they live in Kansas.
Meanwhile, we sit in our appreciating homes, occasionally tut-tutting about the housing crisis while voting down every apartment complex, opposing every zoning change, and supporting every regulation that makes building more expensive. We’re like arsonists lamenting the fire.
Here’s my prediction: either we fix this in the next decade through massive policy reform—real zoning changes, streamlined approvals, state preemption of local obstructionism—or we’ll become a feudal society where property ownership is hereditary. Your kids will own homes if you give them homes. If not, they’ll rent forever from the children of today’s landlords.
The irony is delicious, if you like your comedy dark. The generation that won’t let anything get built near their neighborhoods will spend their golden years wondering why their grandchildren live three time zones away, priced out of the communities where they grew up.
Want to know when this crisis will end? When enough voters realize their children’s future matters more than their property values. Don’t hold your breath.
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