Is home ownership still part of the American Dream?

Is home ownership still part of the American Dream? Business

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12:46

Issued on: 14/05/2026 - 16:29Modified: 14/05/2026 - 16:30

12:46 min Share Play (12:46 min) From the show Reading time 1 min

Owning a home has long been a cornerstone of the American Dream, but is increasingly out of reach for many US workers. A report by the White House in April suggests the United States needs 10 million additional houses to meet demand. Meanwhile, the average price of new home sales has jumped over 30 percent in just five years, and rental prices in most major US cities have surged by around 40 percent.

Warren Lowell, Assistant Professor of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University, says the problems of housing affordability and availability have been building for decades. "I think it got really bad coming out of the financial crisis, in the late 2000s. That's a period where we saw large drops and declines in our construction, in building of homes across all types of availability. 

We across the country haven't been able to keep pace or even catch up to the deficits that we created during that period." 

He says the pandemic also impacted the market. "Families that didn't make those moves during that period are now locked into lower mortgage rates that are desirable (...) This kind of leads to a backing-up, a traffic jam, if you will, across homeownership rates. So folks who really want to get into and unlock that wealth development that they can get from homeownership are locked out often. So we see a trickle effect down; higher incomes are renting at older ages than we would have expected typically." 

Lowell says: "We all kind of have this aim and ambition of owning property for ourselves, and growing wealth in that way. The downside is that housing as a social good, as a thing that we all need, sort of gets put to the wayside. And as this push to use housing, to buy a second house, to invest in real estate among our neighbours continues to grow, I worry that housing as a social good becomes less of a focus for us." 

Also in the show: we bring you a report from our correspondents Wassim Cornet and Pierrick Leurent, on how essential workers like nurses and teachers are being priced out of the neighbourhoods they serve in Los Angeles. 

By: Kate MOODY Fadile BHAYAT Agnès LE COSSEC Advertising Related keywords

• housing
• USA
• real estate
• inflation