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- [00:01]
Meta Glasses Advertiser
Introducing Meta Glasses. You have questions. They've got answers.
- [00:06]
Meta Glasses User / Narrator
Hey Meta, what's the capital of Peru?
- [00:08]
Meta AI Assistant
Lima.
- [00:09]
Housing Market Expert / Gen Z Commentator
How do you say where's the restroom in Spanish?
- [00:13]
Meta AI Assistant
Donde esta Alvano?
- [00:15]
Housing Market Expert / Gen Z Commentator
Hey, Meta, is a hot dog a sandwich?
- [00:18]
Meta AI Assistant
Technically, no. Spiritually, yes.
- [00:20]
Meta Glasses Advertiser
Hey Meta, what should I do with my life?
- [00:23]
Meta AI Assistant
That's one of life's biggest questions. What do you think?
- [00:27]
Meta Glasses Advertiser
Ask anything with the new Meta glasses.
- [00:30]
Venmo User
Hey, I just Venmoed you for rent.
- [00:32]
Venmo Representative
Nice. Now I can instantly spend it whether I'm checking out online with Venmo or using a Venmo debit card.
- [00:38]
Venmo User
Say more.
- [00:39]
Venmo Representative
More. Exactly. Because the more you do with Venmo, the more you get, like earning up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on a bundle of brands.
- [00:47]
Venmo User
So order more pizza.
- [00:49]
Venmo Representative
The meth demands it.
- [00:50]
Venmo User
Get the Venmo debit card.
- [00:52]
Venmo Representative
Venmo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. See terms at Venmo Me Stashterm. Venmo checkout not available at all merchants. Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank. Na.
- [01:00]
Housing Market Expert / Gen Z Commentator
If I hear one more boomer on Twitter say just make your coffee at home, you'll save for a house in no time. I may actually start pulling my hair out. And no, canceling Netflix and meal prepping all of your lunches won't make the dent that you think it will either. Earlier this week, CBS News reported that the average home in the United States is now more unaffordable to the average American than at any point in our country's history. Let that sink in for a second. So that's fun. And naturally I ended up quote, tweeting this saying, saying really waiting for the just make your coffee at home people to pipe in on this one. And the boomers in my comments were livid, insisting that indeed, making your coffee at home would be the end all, be all solution to the housing crisis that our generation is facing as we speak. Nope. Nah. So I've got a lot to rant about today because it turns out that our parents buying houses in 1985 is not the same thing as your average 25 to 30 year old trying to buy their first house today. Let me just say right off the rip, this is not a rant complaining session in and of itself or just another entitled Gen Z complaining that life is rigged against our generation and just impossible as a result. People are still saving money and people are still buying houses but pretending that nothing has changed for accessibility into the housing market for young people buying their first family homes is just ignorant of objective reality and completely shoves aside the math behind all of it. This increasingly difficult economic reality for Gen Z isn't political opinion. It's reality. The hard part about all of this is that the concept of a starter home just doesn't really exist anymore. Anymore. The exact same modest homes that our parents were buying for an incredibly reasonable price to start their families are now listed on Zillow for a million plus bucks. And I'm not exaggerating that to make a point. In 242 cities in the United States of America today, starter homes cost $1 million or more. That's triple the 80 cities that cleared that mark before the COVID 19 pandemic. And up from just 226 cities a year ago. 20442 cities require you to be a millionaire to purchase your first family home. And that's even if you're able to buy a single family home from a single family. More often than not today, Gen Zers are competing in the market with flipped renovations of a newly remodeled house, investor owned homes that are held by multinational corporations, and an increasingly limited new housing inventory because of all of the bureaucratic red tape that it even takes to build a new house in the first place. Somewhere along the way, we stopped passing down to the next generation the starter home concept entirely. And then we started attacking Gen Z for wanting an actual home in the first place instead of just a studio apartment in perpetuity as living beyond your means. So we've arrived at the era of what I like to call the 40 year old housing virgin.
- [03:48]
Listener / Commentator
Oh no, that's. That's crazy.
- [03:50]
Housing Market Expert / Gen Z Commentator
No, really, Last November it came out that the average age of a first time home buyer in America climbed to 40 years old. Old 40.
- [03:59]
Listener / Commentator
You know, 40 is the new 20.
- [04:01]
Housing Market Expert / Gen Z Commentator
Probably because the cost of housing and the rate of our salaries just haven't kept up at the same ratio that our parents had at our age. Even if wages have doubled since then, housing prices have more than doubled. So let's do some math. Not my favorite thing in the world, but important. The median income in the early 1980s for the American household was about $21,000 and the median home price was about $64,000. Must have been nice. Which meant that the price to income ratio showed a house price being about three times an annual salary. But today, in the mid-2020s, the median household income is about $80,000, while the median home price is about $420,000 a year, or five times the amount that you're Making in your salary. Then add in higher property taxes, insurance, HOA fees, repairs, and everything just ends up compounding to be a gargantuan price point that the average y young person scraping by in today's economy just can't realistically afford. Precisely why the just save your money and make coffee at home thing doesn't work out. As I just mentioned, the average household income in America today is about 80 to $85,000. So let's assume that an upper middle class successful adult on their own is making about 70k with a $70,000 annual income stream. Think about all of the things you have to pay for just to bare minimum survive. Federal taxes, state taxes, health insurance, putting money into your 401k, paying your rent, buying groceries, putting in your car, paying for the utilities of your house, paying off your student loans, car insurance. The list could go on and on. So where exactly is the extra $80,000 down payment on a $420,000 house supposed to come from? I'll tell you where it's not coming from. Buying a cup of coffee outside your house. Even if you happen to do that every day. They say a Starbucks every single weekday would cost you about $2,000 a year, which is insane, by the way. You shouldn't be doing that. But not nearly enough to cover the cost of a down payment on a home. And before you get to but, but, but, but 15% mortgage rates, just like you. That's true. Interest rates were brutal in the 1980s, but homes themselves were dramatically cheaper. If you borrowed $70,000 to buy your first home at 15%, you could also always refinance later. But Today you're borrowing $450,000 at 7%. And the higher principal means higher monthly rates, and the higher principal means higher monthly payments, even if eventually those rates end up declining. When we think about housing affordability, we have to think about price plus interest plus insurance plus taxes, the whole enchilada. And young people today trying to buy their first home are facing massive pressure from all four. The thing is, this isn't really about houses at the end of the day. It's about being told as a generation that the very real struggles we are living through every day aren't real. It's like we're literally being told on a day by day basis you're poor because you had Chipotle for lunch. When in reality the cost of rent doubled. The cost of housing more than doubled, the cost of insurance exploded. The cost of college rose dramatically. The cost of health care ended up increasing and generally wages just didn't or at least couldn't keep up with them as a young family trying to navigate buying our first home ourselves. Right now it is incredibly difficult to even know where to start and I find myself praying for the right opportunity with every passing day. And speaking of prayer, this month our friends at Hallow, the world's largest prayer app, are dropping the fifth installment of their series Saints in 7 Days, and I think it might be my favorite one yet. Three incredible voices are leading us through the stories of three incredible saints and you can follow quarterback Fernando Mendoza, author and mom Catherine Schwarzenegger Pratt, and Sister Mary Bethany as they walk through the stories of St. Paul Ruth, and one of my personal favorites, Joan of Arc, who I think is hiding right behind me. You may have heard of these people before, but do you actually know their stories? Because the Saints, these or others weren't superheroes. They were real people. They had doubts, struggles in ordinary days just like we do. What set them apart was their yes to God, even in the midst of their struggles. And that's exactly what the Saints in Seven Days Challenge is meant for you to do in your own life too. It's one of my favorite things on the platform platform. But Hallow is also home to more than 10,000 prayers, songs, guided meditations, Gregorian chants, podcast episodes, and more. So you can recenter your life around prayer, especially if it's been slipping away these first six months of the year and you're trying to refocus as we get closer to the end of 2026. Grow your relationship with God starting today by checking out Hallow and downloading the app for three months free using Code Isabel Whether you happen to be a conservative or a liberal, whether you're an elected Republican or a Democrat, dismissing these very real changes to general exist survival in our country with advice for personal spending habits completely overlooks the changing landscape that we grew up in and now are adults in trying to get by. Not to mention, I am so tired of Gen Z being labeled this lazy, narcissistic, entitled generation who just doesn't work hard when that may be true of some individual people, but is not indicative of our generation's mentality at all. Just as an aside, I came across a really interesting Bloomberg article this last week highlighting college students who are using AI while they are going to college in order to start their own companies and become multimillionaires by the time they graduate. Instead of just competing with a sea of college graduates all with a diploma in their back pocket after graduation day this is the spirit of Gen Z innovation that I see every single day on college campuses and on social media across the country. We may dismiss AI as chatbots and holographic girlfriends and boyfriends, and there is some of that out there. But the most innovative and smartest Gen Z are figuring out that AI can do the market research, build the prototypes and automate the grunt work for a company that used to require a massive team and a huge budget. So real students at real universities are making millions of dollars while they're still earning their degree to figure it all out. Like an 18 year old currently studying at Carnegie Mellon who started building an AI platform for consulting firms during his first semester of college and raised about $2 million in pre seed funding in the process. Or a real student at Rice University who's building an autonomous drone for organ delivery using AI while he's still a student in college. And as a result of all of this venture are now DMing students directly while they are in college and building funds designed specifically for student founders of companies driven by AI. 17% more startup companies were founded in the past year than previously projected by all of the experts out there. That is not a blip on the radar or something to be ignored, but directly attributed to the innovation of this next generation. And I have no doubt that we'll need to be this innovative in the housing market too, not just the job market. And we are getting quite innovative with the revival of homesteading that I see on social media every single day. Or creating a new concept of family compounds where multigenerational living is making quite a comeback in its new fun 21st century way. Redefining that white picket fence American dream for the 2020s and beyond. But it is undeniable that a huge component of how we fix the housing crisis for the next generation is policy. And until literally right this second, no one in Washington D.C. wanted to touch this issue with a 10 foot pole. Just in the past few days, Congress has now passed a bill that's now become law that's supposedly opening up the housing market, people and other people experiencing barriers to entry. It bans large corporations from buying single family homes, which is long overdue. A single family home should be owned and occupied by a single family, not Blackstone. And they're trying to cut some of the bureaucratic red tape that makes it really, really difficult to impossible to build a new home in the first place, which is really helpful. But Congress and those in political power are also failing to address one of the largest contributing factors to why The American housing market is so broken, it's the major elephant in the room that no one is paying attention to. But continue continues to lurk behind the scenes. Illegal immigration. A huge study was released this year out of Dallas found that in a local area's workforce, a 1% increase in illegal immigrant workers coming in 1% caused a 2.2% rise in the price of homes and a 1.4% rise in rent. So as a result, in the average metro area in America, unauthorized, unvetted, unchecked illegal immigration that led millions of people into our country directly raised home prices by more than 6.6% and rent prices by almost 5% in the average metro area. This study says that directly explains directly, not indirectly, 30% of total home price growth in our country and 20% of the increased cost of rent directly attributed to illegal immigration. It is insane to me that the American government has not done more to prioritize American citizens living in American homes. And instead we've done everything that we possibly can to provide housing accessibility or even free housing to literally everyone else. By the way, fixing the housing crisis would solve a whole lot of other problems in our country too. Or at least contribute to helping to solve them. The Institute for Family Studies also recently found that housing affordability directly explains 25% in the drop of fertility rates that we've seen in our country. What many people have been calling a fertility crisis in which by 2045 the American population is to peak and dramatically fall. They say expensive housing suppresses the ability for the family to grow in our country because it shifts young families into smaller housing so they're unable to have more kids. And they drive the migration of families away from the job market and towards more affordable areas. They suggest a really simple solution to fix the family decline in our culture. More affordable family friendly housing. I'm happy to see this bill from Congress passed in the last couple of weeks. But when the best solution that everyone came up with with a few months ago was let's give gen Z a 50 year mortgage so they can keep borrowing money longer, it makes me wonder. But I hope banning multinational corporations from buying single family homes is a step in the right direction. And I hope cutting through the bureaucratic red tape is too. The point of all of this is really simple. Every Gen Zer deserves to start their own American dream in their own literal backyard. And the way we've been approaching the ability to buy a house for this generation by telling them they should make their coffee at home has got to change. If you feel like you can't afford a home as a young single person or a young family? What's the reason for that? What's stopping you? Let us know in the comments.
- [14:34]
Meta Glasses User / Narrator
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