The American dream of owning a home — a yard, a fence, a stake in the neighborhood — is slipping out of reach for many young adults. Policymakers keep treating this as a pure affordability problem. Prices, interest rates, and down payments are all important, but the real culprit lies beneath the numbers: family formation, especially marriage.
First-time buyers made up just 21% of home purchases last year, the lowest share on record. The median first-time buyer is now 40 — up from 33 in 2021 and 29 in 1981. Census data show homeownership for Americans ages 25-34 at about 35%, roughly 19 percentage points lower than in 1980, when mortgage rates were much higher.
We keep treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease.
Affordability helps explain some of that decline. Housing is cyclical, and prices will soften if government stops inflating asset bubbles. But a newer analysis argues the bigger driver is cultural, not fiscal: the drop in marriage.
American Enterprise Institute scholar Scott Winship analyzed census data for the Institute for Family Studies and found that most of the generational decline in young homeownership tracks the collapse in marriage. While overall homeownership among Americans under 35 sits around 35%, the rate for young married couples remains about 63%.
“As recently as 2023, 63% of young married couples were homeowners,” Winship wrote. “That was the same as in 1983 and only 3 percentage points lower than at the height of the 2000s housing bubble. The 2023 rate was also higher than in any year through 1970 and any year from 1985 to 1999.”
That should change the argument. The big generational slide in homeownership hasn’t hit married couples the same way. The bigger collapse is marriage itself. The share of Americans ages 25-34 who are married fell from about 67% in 1980 to about 37% in 2025 — a 30-point drop. That’s the hole in the bucket.
So the answer shouldn’t just be “more programs.” It should address the cultural drivers behind the marriage collapse — because no housing bill can substitute for family formation.
That’s why the usual Washington approach misses the point. After decades of affordability initiatives dating back to the Clinton era, homeownership still hasn’t surged. Yet Republicans in the Senate just passed Elizabeth Warren’s housing bill — another expansion of HUD programs that would rope more people into an inflated market while rewarding the same political class that helped inflate it.
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We keep treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease.
In the long run, the country won’t face a shortage of houses. The baby boom generation holds a huge share of the housing stock. Those homes will enter the market as boomers age and pass away, often transferring to heirs. The deeper question is whether the next generation will form families stable enough to buy them — and want them.
So, why is marriage declining?
Contrary to a popular assumption, it’s not mainly the housing crisis depressing family formation. The bigger driver is spiritual and cultural: a rejection of God and biblical values. Rising costs can pressure families at the margins. But a slightly higher child tax credit won’t reverse a collapse that began generations ago with the decline of worship and the rise of a culture that treats marriage as optional.
Europe has run the experiment. Many countries tried generous incentives — paid leave, universal child care, expanded benefits — and still can’t restore stable birth rates. Money can ease sacrifice. It can’t create the desire for marriage and children.
But faith can.
Institute for Family Studies senior fellow Brad Wilcox has noted that the birth rate for religiously oriented people has never fallen below replacement. A large Harvard study found that frequent religious service attendance (more than once a week) correlates with a 50% lower divorce rate compared with those who never attend. Strong marriages create the conditions for stable family life — and stable homeownership.
Anyone raised in an orthodox Christian or Jewish home learns the opening chapters of Genesis early: Marriage and children aren’t lifestyle accessories. They’re duties bound up with meaning, responsibility, and love. Faith-based communities also create thicker social bonds and clearer norms — including a dating pool that doesn’t feel like a battlefield.
A new Pew Research survey shows worship and practice dropping across every region over the last two decades. In the South, only 51% say they pray daily — still the highest region, but down 14 percentage points in a decade. The share of religiously unaffiliated Southerners rose to about a quarter of the population. In the West, 35% report no religious affiliation.
That decline makes the marriage decline easier to understand — and it helps explain why young homeownership is falling with it.
If we want more young Americans to buy homes, we should stop pretending this is only about interest rates and HUD programs. We need cultural repair. We need marriage. And to rebuild marriage, we need to rebuild the house of God.
As part of his affordability agenda, President Trump has been looking for ways to bring down housing costs.
He’s had some success. Mortgage rates are lower than at any point since his first term. The National Association of Realtors’ Housing Affordability Index has started ticking up again. And as Trump noted during his State of the Union address, the cost of buying a house has dropped about $5,000 since he took office.
Affordability is the target. A serious policy needs to increase the number of homes Americans can actually buy, not just score points against investors.
More work remains. Trump brought a guest to the State of the Union to make the point. Rachel Wiggins, a Houston mom of two, told a story many families recognize: She bid on 20 homes and “lost all of those bids to gigantic investment firms that bypassed inspection, paid all cash, and turned all those houses into rentals, stealing her American dream,” Trump said.
That experience explains the executive order Trump signed to curb large institutional investors from dominating the single-family market — driving up prices for buyers and renters alike while shrinking supply for both.
Trump’s order sets a clear policy: Large institutional investors should not buy single-family homes that families could otherwise purchase. It does that by restricting federal approval, insurance, guarantees, securitization, and other forms of facilitation for institutional purchases of single-family homes that could go to owner-occupants. It also limits the disposal of federal assets in ways that transfer single-family homes to large institutional investors.
The order goes farther. It directs the administration to promote sales to individual owner-occupants — people who actually live in the homes and care for the neighborhoods — through first-look policies, disclosure requirements, and anti-circumvention provisions. It also directs the legislative affairs office to produce legislation to codify the order.
The order includes narrow exceptions for build-to-rent projects planned, permitted, financed, and constructed as rental communities, as well as other tailored cases. It also directs the Treasury Department to tighten rules affecting housing acquisition and instructs the attorney general and the Federal Trade Commission chairman to review major acquisitions, especially serial purchases, and to prioritize antitrust enforcement as warranted.
Trump also directed Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner to require owners and managing agents of single-family rentals participating in federal housing assistance programs to disclose indirect owners, managers, and affiliates and to report changes in ownership.
In other words, Trump offered a concrete proposal: prioritize owner-occupants, expand supply, and curb the worst market distortions without choking off lawful investment that supports construction and growth.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) offered something else.
Warren unveiled legislation last week before the Senate Banking Committee, where she serves as ranking member. Her approach targets the tax incentives that support housing investment. It would impose higher taxes on any person or entity that owns more than 50 single-family homes. It would also bar access to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac-backed mortgages and restrict purchases of foreclosed homes.
That is less a housing plan than a punishment plan. It aims to drive investors out, even though big investors have never owned more than about 4% of U.S. housing stock. The core problem is supply: The country does not have enough homes for a growing population. The answer is not to chase away capital that can help build housing. The answer is to align incentives so that families — owner-occupants — get first priority.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Warren’s co-sponsor, said he’s willing to work with anyone trying to bring down home prices. Trump should take him up on that offer and make the point directly: The goal is not to punish firms that operated lawfully. The goal is to create rules that prioritize families, encourage construction, and expand affordable supply.
Affordability is the target. A serious policy needs to increase the number of homes Americans can actually buy, not just score points against investors.
Like a highly contagious mind virus, democratic socialism is spreading fast among young Americans. The numbers, the polls, and the election results all point in the same direction: A growing share of the next generation is not just flirting with socialism — it is warming to it.
One poll from late 2025 found that nearly 60% of Americans ages 18 to 24 — and well north of 50% ages 25 to 29 — said they would support a democratic socialist for president in 2028. That support even included about a quarter of self-identified Republicans and 42% of moderates.
America needs a return to proper free-market economic policies — and a cultural renewal that treats liberty not as a slogan, but as a birthright worth defending.
Recent local elections reinforce the point. Democratic socialist mayors on both coasts — Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Katie Wilson in Seattle — won close to 80% of the youth vote in their respective races.
Plenty of institutions deserve blame for this trend. Public schools. Teacher unions. Academia. Legacy media. Social media. Hollywood. Parents too. Each has played a role in shaping how young Americans see the country and what they think “fairness” requires.
But focusing on those inputs misses the deeper driver.
A troubling share of young Americans believes the economy is rigged against them.
In late 2025, the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports conducted polls on how young Americans view the U.S. economy and the American dream. The results were bleak. Only about 2 in 10 young Americans said they expect their economic future and personal happiness to be better than their parents’. Roughly three-quarters said housing costs have reached a “crisis level,” and they believe their odds of owning a home are shrinking by the day.
That despair didn’t come from nowhere.
This generation came of age in the aftermath of the Great Recession. They watched corporate bailouts become routine and “crony capitalism” harden into a feature of the system. They watched politicians arrive in Washington broke and leave rich, often by playing stock-market games that would end careers in the private sector.
They grew up under the shadow of foreign wars that burned trillions on “nation-building” while much of America decayed. They watched the dollar lose value as Washington normalized out-of-control spending, money printing, and debt accumulation. They watched manufacturing shrivel while leaders prioritized globalism over domestic production, dimming the prospects for secure, high-paying jobs.
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Put it together, and you get a generation primed to reject the system — and open to any ideology that promises to punish the winners and rewrite the rules.
Layer on the post-9/11 surveillance state, and the picture darkens further. Many young Americans have never lived in a country where privacy and liberty felt secure. They’ve grown numb to constant monitoring and to platforms that decide what they see, share, and believe. It should not surprise anyone if their commitment to free speech, property rights, and personal liberty weakens under that pressure.
That is why diagnosing the rise of democratic socialism requires more than blaming schools or Hollywood. Those are symptoms and accelerants. The cause is deeper: America has drifted away from too many of the principles that made it a beacon of freedom and a land of opportunity.
If that is true, the remedy won’t come from scolding young Americans for their politics. It will come from proving, again, that free markets can build a stable life, that honest work can buy a home, and that the rules apply to the powerful as well as the weak.
To reduce the appeal of democratic socialism, America needs a return to proper free-market economic policies — and a cultural renewal that treats liberty not as a slogan, but as a birthright worth defending.
Affordability has become a problem for nearly every American. Inflation and the rising cost of living keep chewing through paychecks, and the old markers of the American dream — home ownership, small-business ownership, a secure retirement — feel farther out of reach than they have in years.
Some people respond by demanding more government involvement in daily life. President Trump has taken the opposite view: The government should step back.
Success will not come only from repealing rules. It will come when regulators stop seeing entrepreneurs as problems to manage and start seeing them as partners in growth.
Within days of returning to office, Trump signed two major executive orders aimed at saving money for business owners and taxpayers alike: Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation and the much-discussed DOGE initiative. Their core principle was simple: For every new federal regulation, agencies should eliminate 10 old ones.
One year later, the results are real.
I have spent that year on the front lines of the fight against unnecessary regulation as a regional advocate in the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy. Congress established the office in 1976, but it has taken on renewed life under the current administration.
My team and I have spent the past year meeting with small-business owners — many still trying to recover from the economic damage of the COVID lockdown era — to identify ways the federal government can serve as a partner instead of a roadblock.
Nationwide, our team has met with more than 12,000 businesses.
The full report is available publicly, but the top-line results from the past year are straightforward:
That last number is significant, but it also shows the scale of the broader problem. Federal regulation costs the U.S. economy more than $3 trillion a year by some estimates — roughly 12% of GDP. Much of that burden falls hardest on smaller firms that cannot absorb legal and compliance costs the way large corporations can. Meanwhile, the Code of Federal Regulations has swollen from a few thousand pages decades ago to more than 180,000 pages today.
For small businesses, that kind of regulatory sprawl is not an abstraction. It is a threat.
Big companies can keep in-house counsel, compliance officers, and HR departments on payroll. A family business, a contractor, or a startup working out of a garage cannot. Excessive regulation tilts the playing field toward the largest players and against the very people most likely to create new jobs and local wealth.
For too long, federal rulemaking has treated small-business owners as an afterthought. We once heard that giant firms were “too big to fail.” Today, many small businesses face a different reality: they are becoming too small to succeed.
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One of the most effective tools we have built to push back is the SBA’s Red Tape Hotline — 1-800-827-5722 — which allows small-business owners to speak directly with federal staff about regulatory burdens and offer suggestions for reform. Through that hotline, we have heard from thousands of people we could not have reached in person.
Our broader goal is to improve the regulatory climate for every business owner in the country. But even saving a mom-and-pop shop a few billable hours with an attorney can make a real difference.
In one especially memorable case, SBA staff helped a toy company in Mississippi clear a shipment through Customs and Border Protection in time for December — literally saving Christmas for that business.
The philosophy behind this work is the same one that guided me as mayor of Riverton, Utah, where I recently completed two terms. Riverton has grown because we kept taxes, fees, and regulations low enough for businesses to thrive. Companies came, jobs followed, and the city’s sales-tax revenue doubled during my time in office. Watching that same pro-growth approach work at the national level has been deeply rewarding.
Still, this is only a first down, not a touchdown.
Success will not come only from repealing rules. It will come when regulators stop seeing entrepreneurs as problems to manage and start seeing them as partners in growth. If we can make that shift, we can do more than trim costs. We can make the American dream attainable again.
America has always been a nation of immigrants, and that legacy has been one of our greatest strengths. I know this because I lived it.
As a Lebanese-born American who came to this country legally, built a life through hard work, and now thrives as a venture capitalist and innovator in life sciences, I am living proof of what the American dream can deliver when immigration is done right. My family arrived through the proper channels, embraced the values, language, and culture of this country, and assimilated fully into the fabric of American society. That is how it should be.
The American dream is too precious to dilute. Let’s restore order, enforce the law, and keep it alive for generations to come.
For much of our history, controlled immigration brought talent, energy, and new ideas that fueled American growth and innovation. Waves of legal immigrants from Europe, Asia, and elsewhere contributed enormously while integrating into the American way of life. Immigration worked because it was lawful, deliberate, and tied to assimilation.
But something changed in the 2000s, and it has accelerated dramatically in recent years.
What we see today is an unprecedented surge of illegal immigration, arriving at a scale that overwhelms our systems and defies enforcement. This is not the merit-based, assimilable immigration that built America. It is mass unmanaged entry, often without the time, scale, or structure required for successful integration. The result is strain on communities, erosion of social cohesion, and enormous pressure on public resources.
Assimilation is not optional — it’s essential.
Successful immigrants learn English, respect our laws, adopt our civic values, and contribute positively over generations. When inflows are too rapid and lack incentives to assimilate, pockets of parallel societies form, weakening the national unity that has always been our glue. History shows that when we prioritize assimilation — through language requirements, civic education, and limits on scale — we succeed. When we don’t, division follows.
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This is not a moral indictment of individuals seeking opportunity. It is a condemnation of a broken system that rewards lawlessness and punishes those who follow the rules.
The economic damage is real, and it falls hardest on working Americans.
Illegal immigration represents a direct economic attack on America’s middle and lower classes. Illegal workers compete directly for jobs in construction, hospitality, agriculture, and service industries, driving down wages and displacing American citizens and legal residents who depend on those opportunities. Housing demand rises. Schools and hospitals become overcrowded. Social services are stretched thin, often while illegal workers pay little or no taxes.
The hardest hit are working-class Americans — the very people who built this country and deserve protection from unfair competition.
We are also told that our economy would collapse without this illegal labor. That claim is insulting hyperbole. Nevada, my home state, is resilient. Businesses can and will adapt by raising wages, investing in automation, or hiring legally through existing visa programs for workers who follow the rules and wait their turn.
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Legal, high-skilled immigration adds tremendous value through innovation, entrepreneurship, and productivity gains. We do not need to sacrifice our sovereignty or our workers to achieve growth.
It is time for bold action.
I support a clearly defined, temporary moratorium on most nonessential immigration categories to secure the border fully, enforce existing law, and remove those here illegally. This pause would give us breathing room to reform the system: prioritize high-skilled talent, enforce strict assimilation requirements, limit family-based chain migration that bypasses merit, and restore a steady, controlled immigration pipeline that benefits America first.
That’s stewardship, not cruelty.
America saved my life and gave me opportunities I could never have imagined. I owe this country everything — and that is why I demand that we fix immigration now, before the damage becomes irreversible.
The American dream is too precious to dilute. Let’s restore order, enforce the law, and keep it alive for generations to come.
You won’t hear many people object to President Trump’s executive order to ban corporate purchases of residential homes. The idea sounds like common sense. But it targets a minor symptom while leaving the real disease untouched — and in some respects, it risks making that disease worse.
Institutional home-buying already peaked during the COVID-era bubble and has receded since then. In most markets, corporate ownership represents a small share of total inventory. Even at its height, it never explained why housing costs exploded for everyone else. High prices created the opportunity for institutional buyers, not the other way around.
The goal should not be cheaper debt. It should be cheaper homes.
Government policy inflated the housing market. Institutional buyers simply responded.
During COVID, the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates toward zero. Mortgage rates fell below 3%. At the same time, the Fed bought roughly $2.7 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, and HUD expanded “affordable homeownership” programs that widened the pool of subsidized buyers. Those policies produced predictable results.
When the government offers 2.5% interest for 30 years — often paired with minimal down payments backed by the FHA — buyers flood the market. Sellers respond by raising prices. The bubble becomes a feature, not a bug.
Institutional buyers entered that environment because it looked like easy money. Higher home prices also pushed rents up, so developers built more homes for long-term rental. Both trends flowed from the same source: a government-shaped market that made housing unaffordable, then subsidized the unaffordability.
Trump now seems focused on the symptom — corporate buyers — while ignoring the machinery that inflated the market in the first place.
He has spent months fighting Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to bring rates back down toward zero. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve still holds about $2.1 trillion in mortgage-backed securities. Trump has also announced a plan for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase another $200 billion in MBS. The stated goal is to lower mortgage rates.
But the goal should not be cheaper debt. It should be cheaper homes.
Artificially lowering rates props up prices and slows correction. Prices in many markets have begun to soften. That correction should continue. Policies designed to suppress rates will keep prices elevated and risk inflating the next bubble.
That brings us back to corporate home-buying. Even at the COVID peak, institutional buyers — defined as entities owning at least 100 single-family homes — owned about 3.1% of the housing stock. That number has since fallen to around 1%. Investors see the market turning, and they have started backing away.
So Trump’s corporate-purchase ban arrives late, targets a relatively small share of the market, and risks becoming cosmetic cover for policies that keep the bubble inflated.
If Trump wants to drive prices down and permanently realign housing with median incomes, he has to reverse the policies that inflated the bubble. That means attacking the structure, not the headline.
Get government out of the mortgage market. Trump’s next Federal Reserve chair must commit to unwinding the Fed’s mortgage-backed securities portfolio. That $2.1 trillion cushion keeps mortgage rates lower than the market would otherwise set. Those artificially low rates inflate home prices.
End universal “homeownership for everyone” policy. The federal government keeps subsidizing buyers who are not ready to buy. Those programs inject cash into housing demand that would not exist in a real market. The goal should align prices with income, not chase a utopian dream of universal ownership. After decades of subsidies, deductions, and federal credit support, the home ownership rate still sits around the mid-60% range.
Stop chasing near-zero interest rates. A 30-year loan at 2% sounds appealing until you realize what it does to prices. Cheap money bids up homes across the board. Buyers pay the price forever even as politicians brag about the “deal.” Trump should let the market set rates. Recent rate cuts have not restored normal home buying either. Sales remain weak because prices remain too high.
End the 30-year fixed mortgage. Instead of floating longer loans — 50 years? Madness! — the country should move in the opposite direction. Before the New Deal era, short-term mortgages, often three to seven years, dominated the market. Federal policy transformed that structure.
Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Housing Act of 1934, establishing the Federal Housing Authority. The FHA insured long-term, fully amortizing mortgages with fixed rates, low down payments, and standardized payment schedules. That system moved the market away from short-term balloon loans and laid the foundation for longer terms.
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Congress eventually authorized the 30-year mortgage in 1954. VA loans under the GI Bill and the expansion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac later built a secondary market that made long-term fixed-rate loans attractive to lenders.
Government insurance, guarantees, and liquidity support made 30-year fixed mortgages feasible, which is why they represent 80%-90% of U.S. mortgages today. Without those interventions, lenders would not carry that risk.
The larger point remains simple: Sellers can’t charge prices buyers can’t pay. Prices explode only when government subsidies and government-backed long-term debt expand what buyers can “afford” on paper.
Unwind the subsidies. Unwind the guarantees. Unwind the cheap-money machinery. Let incomes, not federal policy, set the ceiling.
Housing should function like other consumer markets, not be engineered by Washington. Prices should reflect what people earn.
That’s the fix. Everything else treats symptoms and pretends to solve the problem.
Gu embodies what our immigration orthodoxy promotes: an America where citizens of the world can enrich themselves with no loyalties attached.
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