Our mission is to transform lives, communities and generations through homeownership

Young adults of this era lead lives quite different from earlier generations. Compared to older generations, as a group they have been slow to reach life milestones traditionally associated with adulthood, such as getting married, having children, living independently and forming their own households.

For most of 2020, the country has been beset by the COVID-19 pandemic, social unrest sparked by longstanding racial injustice, and the devastating impacts of climate change. Although low interest rates and continued growth in some sectors have bolstered homebuying and the broader economy, conditions have worsened for many households. Indeed, the nation’s failure to live up to its long-stated goal of a decent home in a suitable environment for all has never been clearer— particularly in the lack of affordable rental housing and unequal access to homeownership. Today’s crisis conditions call for a comprehensive re-envisioning of national housing policy.

America is facing an affordable housing crunch—and it was getting worse even before the pandemic struck and eviscerated jobs and incomes.

According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies, nearly one in three households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Almost half of all renters are in that category, including more than ten million households that spend more than 50 percent of income on housing costs.

Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University’s Mapping Displacement Pressure in Chicago project supports ongoing and future public investment decisions by creating a leading indicator to identify neighborhoods where vulnerable populations may be experiencing affordability pressures and displacement risk due to increased housing costs.

Following decades of underbuilding and underinvestment, the state of America’s housing stock, which is among the most critical pieces of our national infrastructure, is dire, with a chronic shortage of af- fordable and available homes to house the nation’s population. The housing stock around the nation has been widely neglected, with a severe lack of new construction and prolonged underinvestment leading to an acute shortage of available housing, an ever-worsening affordability crisis and an existing housing stock that is aging and increasingly in need of repair—all to the detriment of the health of the public and the economy.

While an economic crisis disproportionately impacting the lowest-wage workers has certainly exacerbated their housing instability, the shortage of affordable rental homes for low-income households is not new. Prior to the pandemic there were only 37 affordable and available rental homes for every 100 renter households with extremely low incomes (NLIHC, 2021b), and every state and nearly every county in the U.S. lacked an adequate supply

Living in a stable, adequate home that is affordable to the household yields a multitude of opportunities and stronger outcomes for children, youth, and adults.2 A stable home provides a platform for improved outcomes around employment, health, and education. For instance, the impact of stable housing on children and youth is well documented, including that, without stable housing, young people are more vulnerable to mental health problems, developmental delays, and poor cognitive outcomes.

America is running out of houses amid a historic housing shortage and record-high selling prices. A recent bank note from Jefferies said the US was short 2.5 million homes, while Freddie Mac put that estimate higher at a shortage of 3.8 million. There are 40% fewer homes on the market than last year, a Black Knight report found.

It's bad news for many aspiring homebuyers — but especially for millennials. It's just the latest chapter in a long line of bad economic luck.

In the city, $351,500 was the median price of homes sold in June. That’s up 6.8 percent from June 2020 and is the smallest figure of any month of the current boom. City home prices have been up by double digits in eight of the past 11 months, including May, when prices were up 11.5 percent from a year earlier.