Personal Finance

Young adults struggle to break into housing market as Congress seeks solution

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by Max Rego - 04/19/26 6:00 AM ET

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by Max Rego - 04/19/26 6:00 AM ET

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Young adults are struggling to break into the housing market, facing historically high barriers to homeownership and falling behind previous generations.

A survey released by real estate brokerage Redfin in January found that 38.3 percent of 28-year-olds owned their home last year, less than the 42.5 percent of Gen Xers and 44.4 percent of baby boomers who owned their home at that age.

“They’re just having trouble affording housing in general, and that just makes the prospect of owning a home feel unachievable for them,” Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather told The Hill Wednesday, referring to young adults.

A report released this week by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) found that homeownership rates declined for every five-year age group from 21-25 to 66-70 from 2000 to 2023. That includes a 5.1-percent drop for ages 31-35 and a 5.4-percent decline for ages 36-40.

As young Americans try to fight their way into homeownership, Congress is trying to ride a wave of bipartisan support behind a bill meant to expand the housing supply.

Here is what to know.

‘Window has closed’

Fairweather cited multiple reasons for why young adults are less likely to own a home than prior generations, including mortgage rates spiking over the last five years after falling to “record” lows during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thirty-year fixed mortgages averaged 6.3 percent as of Thursday, according to Freddie Mac. While that marks a decline of nearly 1.5 percentage points relative to late October 2023, it is still more than double rates at the end of 2021.

“That’s causing some of this frustration, that there was this short window for people to get into the housing market, if they could do so — if they lived somewhere affordable or they had a high income or they had help from parents,” Fairweather said.

“But now that window has closed and it’s really challenging.”

There are other contributing factors, such as a challenging job market for recent college graduates and increased rental costs. From 2020-24, renters paid $100 more per month to a median of $1,413, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Those higher costs, Fairweather noted, are prohibiting young adults from building up savings to afford an eventual downpayment on a home.

The barriers to entry are reflected in the data. The median age of first-time home buyers was 35 years old in 2025, down from a peak of 38 in 2018 but still older than the median of 31 in 2008, according to a Redfin analysis of Census data.

During a Democratic Women’s Caucus roundtable with young adult women on Thursday, Rep. Janelle Bynum (D-Ore.) said that young adults “shouldn’t have to wait another 20 years to buy a home” after they get their first job.

How can lawmakers address the issue?

As for what policymakers can do to bring home prices down, Fairweather and other industry economists have emphasized the need to increase supply.

Lawrence Yun, the chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, said in a Monday release that the inventory-to-sales ratio in the housing market is “below historical norms.”

He also noted that an additional “300,000 to 500,000 homes for sale” would bring the market “closer to normal conditions and allow consumers to make purchase decisions without feeling rushed.”

Fairweather said that “red tape” at the local level, including “onerous” permitting processes and restrictive zoning codes, are mostly to blame for these supply issues. Since homeowners benefit from a supply shortage and “are the ones showing up and blocking housing,” she recommended that states wrest regulatory control away from municipalities.

“It really helps to move that control from the local level at least to the state level,” Fairweather said. “It’s a bit difficult in our legal system to move it to the federal level, but the states need to step in and restrict how restrictive the local municipalities can get.”

Senate passes housing bill, House takes it up again

Last month, the Senate took a bipartisan step to tackle housing supply issues.The upper chamber passed the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, a bill spearheaded by

Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Banking, House and Urban Affairs Committee, by a 89 to 10 vote.

That came just more than a month after the House overwhelming passed its version of the bill, sponsored by House Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill (R-Ark.). Since the Senate made amendments to the bill