Home ownership is declining across the West. In America, the rate continues to fall, down 3.5 percentage points since its peak. Australia is down 3 points, Great Britain is down nearly 7 points since, and so on.
These might look like only small drops, but they’re part of a worsening trend. In America, people under 35 have seen the largest decline in home ownership of any cohort, with their real rates falling by 12 points since 1990. Not long ago, the average age of a first-time buyer was around 30. Today it is almost 40 years old. The housing crisis, in other words, is disproportionately a younger person’s crisis.
Lower home ownership rates in a nation are emblematic of a declining standard of living. A poll in Australia showed that over 70% of young people believed home ownership is out of reach, and similar perceptions obtain in America.
But home ownership isn’t just a line on a graph: it’s a person’s life, their future, and the basis of a functional, safe, and cohesive country. The Institute for Family Studies found that the benefits of home ownership include “enhanced life satisfaction and psychological health,” along with “higher rates of civic involvement” and “better school performance.”
It also strongly correlates with marriage. A paper in the American Economic Journal found that “marriage rates have become increasingly stratified by homeownership” and that “households with easier home purchase display more relationship stability.”
Less home ownership also means fewer families. One peer-reviewed study found that expensive housing can delay a woman’s first birth by three to four years. Another found that a 1 percentage point increase in home prices reduces the number of children by at least 0.07. The housing crisis is driving people into childless atomization.
If you want to fix this crisis, you first need to have an honest conversation about what’s causing it. Despite attempts by organizations like The New York Times to cast the housing issue as “complex,” the problem is actually brutally simple: too many people, too few homes. Or to be even more honest, too many immigrants. A study by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) shows that 6.6 million new migrants have arrived since 2021, at a time when America already has a housing shortage in the several millions.
Steven A. Camarota, the Director of Research at CIS, outlined the issue: “Since January of 2021 the number of immigrant-headed households is up 2.4 million, with perhaps 1.4 million of this increase due to illegal immigration.” Unsurprisingly, home and rental costs skyrocketed in that time.
One of the unspoken stories of the Springfield, Ohio, Haitian migrant scandal last year was the housing crisis caused by the migrant influx that priced locals out of their own town. The Cato Institute found the median sale price of a single-family home sold in Springfield “increased from $78,500 in August 2019 to $158,000 in August 2024,” a 101% increase in nominal terms, and more than double the national average.
Mass immigration is leading to a process of displacement. Native-born people are being displaced from their homes, their towns, and their future. It also raises a fundamental question: Who are we building homes for? The next generation, or the highest bidder?
President Donald Trump and his administration have shown that they understand the issue and recognize its true cause. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Vice President JD Vance posted on X that Trump’s plan to deport 20 million illegal migrants “will absolutely make housing more affordable for American citizens.” Meanwhile, President Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that the president would “stop the unsustainable invasion of illegal aliens which is driving up housing costs.”
It’s not just immigration they’re targeting. A White House release announced that the administration will cut regulations to “lower the cost of housing and expand housing supply.” Home ownership, it reads, is “a ticket to the American dream.”
On this front, President Trump has announced plans to unlock federal land to reopen the frontier and allow for more housing development. Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo told Newsweek that the state “would tremendously benefit from the release of federal land for housing,” and mentioned the state’s severe lack of inventory and available land to build new homes on.
This would help pave the way for “Freedom Cities.” These cities, in President Trump’s words, would spark “unprecedented innovation in fields like aerospace, construction, and manufacturing.” As Mike Solana, Vice President of Founders Fund, has noted, “We have three options as a society: stagnate and decline, assume literally dictatorial control of a city like San Francisco or Los Angeles and rebuild it from scratch, or free up a small fraction of federal land for development.”
Put simply, the best way to improve a nation’s mental health, fertility and marriage rates, and civic engagement would first be to deport 20 million illegal migrants, reduce legal migration until housing is caught up, and then create the conditions for people to build new cities, new homes, and explore new frontiers.
The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.
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