“They’re only noodles, Micheal.” – The Lost Boys
I entered a contest and won a lifetime supply of ramen. I took the $20 instead.
Let’s start with the sliver of good news, because in this market it’s rare enough to mention: Many illegals have left the country. Not enough, mind you, but enough to show just how fake this economy is. The result is real. Rents are down where illegals live.
At least a little. I found a great place to rent, fully furnished, but then the clerk told me it was a liquor store.
Sigh.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development to straight-up say illegals drove up to two-thirds of rental demand growth in recent years, so when .gov admits the problem, you know it’s really worse. After years of unrestricted immigration flooding the rental market, the brakes got tapped. Studies show that renter household growth cooled once immigration restrictions hit.
Average rent that hovering around $2,000 a month are finally showing some give instead of the nonstop 36% climb we saw the last five years. This is, at least a small win for the working guy who just wants to keep the roof over his head while he eats ramen and smokes recreational weed.
Now the bad news.
And there’s plenty of bad news.
Housing is now unaffordable to Gen Z, and it is far worse as a percentage of their income than for any previous generation. 67% of Gen Z adults say they’re struggling to cover housing costs. That’s higher than Millennials (53%), Gen X (54%), or Boomers (36%).
When I grounded my Gen Z kids, their punishment was to go out and socialize. (meme as-found)
Homeownership for Gen Z sits at just 27.1% in 2025 data rolling into this year, which is a tiny bump from the year before, but miles behind where previous generations stood at the same age. Zoomers need to earn over $112,000 a year to afford the median house.
The problem? Median household income lags by about $25,000. Nearly two million young households simply vanished from the market in 2025 because the math doesn’t work. Housing is chewing up 40-50% of take-home pay. That’s not a stepping stone to a family and 2.6 kids. That’s a millstone.
Let’s delve deeper into the problem.
First, housing areas are limited, and the mass blight of urban hellscapes led to the creation and flowering of suburbia, where people could move and raise a family in relative safety. Let’s be honest, a huge part of suburbia was economic segregation from . . . economic factors. Suburbs? You have to have a certain income level to live there.
When I think about the meaning of life, I think about three factors: 2, 3, and 7. (cartoon as-found)
Good schools. Low crime. Space to breathe. No economic factors.
That flight from the cities created the demand, but supply never kept up. Zoning, NIMBYs, and decades of stupid policy turned safe family neighborhoods into a scarce luxury good. Housing prices have risen much more than inflation. While wages wobbled along like me on a Saturday night, home values sprinted like me out of the office on Friday afternoon. Suburbia went from attainable dream to gated fortress most young people can only stare at through the fence.
Second, interest rates are up. That’s the sort of thing that happens when the cash printer is on high and the oil pump is on low. Higher interest rates lead to higher home costs for the same price house, as interest eats up more and more of the (now higher) payment.
Mortgage rates eased to around 6.2% by the end of 2025, but that’s still double the pandemic-era giveaway lows. A $400,000 house that felt doable at 3% now demands a monthly payment that feels like indentured servitude. Equity builds slower. Gen Z runs the numbers on their phones and decide roommates, ramen, and the low-rizz life beat the alternative.
Third, houses are treated like an economic appreciation machine whose values never go down. This has led to many borrowers taking out loans near the peak value of their houses, and that peak value locks them in. If they sell at a loss, they lose actual money, so they can’t sell for less than they owe.
We’re actually at an all-time high for the Google® search term “can’t sell my house.” Google Trends just hit record levels in February 2026: higher than 2008, higher than the COVID frenzy. Sellers are frozen. Buyers can’t bridge the gap. The shut down like a date with a Kardashian when you tell them you’re broke. Houses stopped being homes and turned into leveraged bets on eternal growth.
Markets don’t do eternal.
“There are no mistakes, just happy little accidents.” Bob was a horrible nuclear physicist.
Fourth, banks don’t want foreclosures to hit the market. Why? It makes the rest of the loans in their portfolio worth less, so they’re incentivized to sit on houses rather than sell them and realize the loss on the books. Foreclosure filings jumped 14% in 2025 to 367,460 properties, but that’s still historically low and banks are dragging their feet with modifications and delays. How much of the current private credit crisis is due to just this? My guess is: plenty. Those balance sheets are stuffed with crappy paper because it was different this time.
Fifth, those nice suburban houses with a thirty minute to sixty-minute commute are now even more expensive because the fuel to drive to where the jobs are at is much higher thanks to Gulf War IV. Or is it Gulf War VI? I forget. That suburban split-level two towns over suddenly costs a fortune just to reach. The effective price of the dream just went up again.
The result of this mess is that Gen Z gets further behind. The kids that should be having kids aren’t. There are several factors to this, especially female hypergamy where every female (thinks she) is above average, but every male is below her standards. But the sheer difficulty in having a home in which to raise kids is massive is also killing family formation. No stability, no backyard, no “let’s start a family” talk that ends in anything but spreadsheets that fill with negative numbers.
Is a 4 with a 6-pack a perfect 10?
Birth rates keep dropping. In one generation, we went from the GloboLeftElite telling us to stop having kids because “the planet can’t handle more!” to the GloboLeftElite telling us we need to import kids because we need workers.
They break the system, then demand more system to patch the system they created. Young couples look at the numbers and decide “maybe later.” Or never. Unless they’re from (spins wheel) Somalia. In that case, it’s free fun and prizes while you bring in an alien people with an alien religion.
The good news?
This type of mess always sorts itself out. The cure for high prices is default and deflation. If the market is too far cooked, well, look out below. The United States doesn’t have magic dirt to turn Somalis into Americans, and houses aren’t magic wealth machines. When enough locked-in owners and over-leveraged banks finally crack, inventory floods, prices reset, and affordability returns.
It won’t be pretty. Foreclosures will spike. Portfolios will bleed. Credit markets may lock up. The Google® searches for “can’t sell my house” will turn into actual sales at prices that make sense again.
I used to have a really funny polio joke, but no one gets it anymore.
A housing crisis wouldn’t be big for the country, would it?
Nah. Just trillions in pretend wealth gone, generational transfers halted, and the kind of reset that makes 2008 look like practice.
Prepare accordingly. The reset is coming.
I’m glad I like ramen.
Meme
