Rahm Emmanuel (Washington Post), What’s really depressing America’s young men: The U.S. has two overlapping problems: the housing crisis and despondency in young men. Emmanuel writes,
The United States today is engaged in two conversations that appear, at first blush, to be entirely unconnected.
The first focuses on men and boys. As Richard Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has highlighted, younger-generation American males are increasingly despondent. The stereotype is of young men perpetually playing video games in their parents’ basements, too depressed and shut in to ask women out. But such exaggeration shouldn’t eclipse the broader and more subtle reality. You don’t have to be an incel to believe that the “system” is fundamentally broken and rigged against your success.
Separately, city and state leaders everywhere are focused on the housing crisis — specifically homeownership. Rents are too high, and even the most ordinary houses are astronomically expensive. Zoning is exclusive, interest rates are too high, and the legacy of redlining lives on. Worse, new home construction has dropped to a five-year low. We’re not building enough homes to keep up with demand, and even if we were, those just starting off wouldn’t be able to comfortably afford them.
These patterns are two sides of the same coin. Just 30 years ago, the median age of first-time home buyers was 28. Today, it’s 38. In 2000, the typical price of a single-family home was three times a family’s annual income; today, it’s six times. The effects are clear: In Germany and Spain, where real estate prices have climbed more modestly over the past 30 years, the percentage of young adults who report regularly experiencing worry, sadness and anger has largely remained steady. In the United States, however, where home prices have risen 85 percent, one-third of young adults now report a sense of despondency.
This is, of course, a problem for all Americans — men and women alike. But, unpopular as it might be to say in some quarters of my party, the crisis affects one gender with particular potency. Like it or not, American men are still raised to believe that their role is to act as providers and protectors. And when men whose self-worth is tied up in that aspiration realize they’ll never be able to buy a home, they’re bound to feel shame and anger.
The American Dream can’t live up to its name when only a tenth of the population has a shot at it. The dream has become unaffordable and inaccessible in a way that Democrats should declare unacceptable. Democrats talk all the time about democracy being on the ballot. But the solution won’t be found only in registering more voters or making mail-in balloting universal. The problem is that real generation-over-generation prosperity is harder to achieve today. This shouldn’t be some mystery: American democracy became unstable at almost exactly the same time the American Dream became unaffordable. And because that’s not a coincidence, we need to tackle the homeownership challenge head-on.
This isn’t a marketing problem. It’s not just a matter of Democrats finding our own Joe Rogan, or making better use of TikTok, or using more “authentic” language. Of the necessities for which prices keep rising — gasoline, groceries, health care — housing is first among equals. And if Democrats want to save our democracy while simultaneously fighting against economic inequality, we need to address the primary source of half the country’s humiliation and anger.
This challenge didn’t emerge overnight. To understand its roots, look no further than the 2008 financial crisis. As the mortgage bubble burst, millions of families lost their homes explicitly because Wall Street had rigged the system. And yet the bankers who participated in the rigging demanded their annual bonuses — and in most cases received them.
As White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, I advocated Old Testament justice. I wanted to hold the bankers who sold liar loans accountable. But my arguments on a Saturday afternoon in the Roosevelt Room were overruled, perhaps wisely, so that Democrats could first pursue health care reform. Though we later instituted the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, no one ever went to prison — adding insult to injury. You can draw a straight line from that outrage to the tea party and, eventually, to the candidacy of Donald Trump, who promised to be an instrument of “your justice [and] retribution.”
If there’s any silver lining to the housing crisis, it’s that, unlike so many of our national challenges, it’s solvable. Unlike the rise of China, or the specter of AI, or the scourge of global climate change, we don’t need a new batch of policy tools or institutions to help working-class families purchase their first homes. We’ve done this before.
A century ago, mortgages were unaffordable to the broad mass of potential buyers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal responded by engineering a system that made 30-year fixed-rate loans that amortized the principal accessible to most home buyers — an effort that then evolved to encompass Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Not long thereafter, the government enacted the GI Bill for World War II veterans. Details of the housing market are different today, but the fundamentals are the same. So let’s apply the lessons.
First, much as we treat veterans as a population apart when it comes to home-buying, we should treat first-time home buyers as their own class. To make it easier for them to reach that first crucial rung on the ladder to economic prosperity, we should reinstitute the Obama administration’s $8,000 homebuyer’s tax credit, triple it to reflect present market conditions and index the benefit to inflation. Second, we should explore ways to make it possible for first-time home buyers to take out mortgages at favorable interest rates.
Third, in learning from the recent successes Texas and California have had with state-level reforms making land cheaper and zoning more streamlined, we should champion federal policies that incentive housing production. Texas now allows housing on land zoned for commercial use statewide; California just enacted a bill making infill housing much easier to construct. As Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) have proposed, the federal government should be rewarding states and localities that embrace supply-side solutions.
Tackling homeownership head-on is poised to be the ultimate example of how good policy turns out to be good politics. As data expert David Shor found in his analysis of the 2024 presidential race, the best moment of Kamala Harris’s campaign coincided with the decision to air television spots focused on housing costs. Today, the stock market is near an all-time high, CEOs are paid nearly 300 times the wage of average workers, and the uber-rich are building personalized spaceships. Yet young couples can’t afford a down payment for their first home.
The vast majority of Americans once believed they could enter the middle class by working hard and playing by the rules. Now, a burgeoning percentage of young people feel as though they’re running in place and getting nowhere fast. The hope of owning a little slice of the future is woven deeply into our national psyche. And the Democratic Party’s success hinges on our ability to enable men in particular to realize that hope and ensure their own success.
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