A big look at the state of housing in America: Boomers won’t sell, millennials can’t buy, and Gen Z gets to watch the whole thing sort itself out
A new forecast says housing supply will finally outpace demand by 2035. Congratulations to everyone who wasn't born before 1997.
A big look at the state of housing in America: Boomers won’t sell, millennials can’t buy, and Gen Z gets to watch the whole thing sort itself out
Overview
Since the pandemic, hopeful homebuyers have grown accustomed to a certain narrative: An inventory squeeze and swathes of homeowners unwilling to move means demand for housing has vastly outpaced the supply of available homes. It’s a dynamic that could soon be put into reverse by the same demographic pressures transforming every other part of the U.S. economy.
Last year, the U.S. housing supply deficit reached 4.03 million homes, with new housing construction slipping and high prices keeping younger potential buyers locked out of the market. Millennials and Gen Zers have had it worse in a housing market still dominated by baby boomers. The older generation still accounts for some 42% of purchases and 52% of sales, according to Realtor.com data, while the share of first-time homebuyers is only 21%, the lowest proportion in more than four decades.
Chronically insufficient supply has collided with millennials and older Gen Zers aging closer to prime homebuying age, a confluence of factors that has pushed national home prices up 55% between 2020 and 2025, according to a report published Monday by the Mortgage Bankers’ Association (MBA). But a shifting demographic reality in the U.S.—that of an older population and a shrinking young base of homebuyers—might be enough to flip that narrative, at least for the bulk of Gen Z. Millennials, meanwhile, who have been patiently waiting for a home for years, are going to have to fight it out with each other for the scraps.
The MBA paper forecasted housing prices to rise only 1% this year, down from a 4% hike as recently as 2024. Over the next two years, the organization expects home prices to flatline, bookending a turbulent and chaotic period for U.S. housing, and it might be all thanks to the country’s rapidly aging population and a shrinking cohort of younger homebuyers.
Over the next two decades, household formation, the rate at which people move into new housing, will start slowing significantly, according to the MBA, softening demand and opening up more opportunities for younger Americans to get into the housing market. It’s good news for younger Gen Zers who haven’t reached prime homebuying age yet, but it might be too little, too late for the country’s unlucky millennial cohort.
A delayed correction
For years, the supply side has received the bulk of blame for the great housing mismatch. Productivity in the U.S. construction industry has stagnated for decades, with Goldman Sachs recently calculating a 0.6% annual decline in sector productivity ever since 1965. Researchers have attributed this slump to a slow rate of technological innovation and increasingly tight local regulations that have squashed incentives to build.
The result has been a chronically inadequate housing supply, a problem compounded in recent years by higher interest rates.
But the next big shift in housing might come from the demand side of the equation, or more specifically, the lack of it. Household formation is expected to slow in the coming years because of population aging, low fertility rates, smaller young adult cohorts, and reduced immigration, according to the MBA paper.
Details
The oldest baby boomers are now in their 80s, and their tight grip on housing will likely loosen in the coming years as more move into assisted living or pass away. Meanwhile, the Gen Zers now aging into homebuying represent a smaller cohort than their elders. Combined with falling net migration and slowing overall population growth, the result is softening demand mixed with healthier supply.
But that shift likely won’t kick in early enough for millennials to make much use of it. The MBA paper estimated housing supply could grow by 10.6 million to 14.6 million units between 2026 and 2035—likely outpacing projected demand of around 11 million over the same period. It’s a forecast that could bode well for many Gen Zers who can wait the market out for a decade or so, but their older counterparts might have already missed the train.
“Maybe for the younger generations, there will be enough homes, and we’ll see maybe a little bit of a shift here, but for the late 30-year-olds, or early 40-year-olds, I don’t know that it changes all that much,” Cristian DeRitis, Moody’s deputy chief economist, previously told Fortune.
These trends will likely be sustained, and potentially accelerate as time goes on. Birth rates in the U.S. have been steadily declining for nearly two decades, meaning each generation that now ages into homebuying will likely be smaller than the last, absent higher immigration.
Last year marked the first time in at least half a century that more people left the U.S. than moved there in response to the Trump administration’s tightening anti-immigrant restrictions. Most forecasts, including from the Congressional Budget Office, project net migration to return positive in coming years, though experts at the Brookings Institution have warned that should the U.S. become a permanently less appealing destination to international migrants, the country would likely be facing population decline.
To be sure, supply might not balloon at the rapid pace many homebuyers might hope for. Baby boomer empty nesters still own almost twice the share of large homes as millennial families, according to Redfin data, and many aren’t planning on leaving any time soon. A large majority of boomers say they intend to “age in place,” living out their retirement in their house and rely on in-home care, a trend that would do little to salvage the country’s housing stock in the near future. Another Redfin survey last year found around one third of boomers say they never plan to sell their home, and another 30% don’t plan on selling for at least another decade.
America’s demographic shift is reshaping everything from the labor force to college enrollment, but when it comes to housing, population pressures are running into a formidable foe who millennials already know well: baby boomers with no intention of stepping aside.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Source
Originally published at fortune.com.
