“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.
There’s a third “D” besides “default” and “deflation” that is a painful requirement to straighten out the housing market, and that is “deportation”.
Sadly, many if not most current American homes are not built by Americans. I have fond memories of my maternal grandfather and uncles working as construction laborers back in the 1960s, frequently helping them myself picking up trash as they built rural homes on isolated country plots. (Quote from my grandpa to an awestruck kid me, looking at his purple thumb: “When you hit your thumb with a hammer, you just grunt a little”.) Subdivisions became a thing in the 1970s, a trend my dad latched onto as a builder himself along with many other entrepreneurs. In the quest for ever-lower labor costs, er, because of greed over patriotism, here we are today.
https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/mass-deportations-would-worsen-our-housing-crisis
Hundreds of thousands of home construction jobs opened up by deportations, to go along with the additional hundreds of thousands of currently unfilled construction jobs – what a godsend to those who now need a job to qualify for EBT that no longer covers sugar infusions!
https://www.propel.app/snap/snap-work-requirements-full-guide/
https://alabamareflector.com/2026/03/04/alabama-senate-passes-bill-excluding-soda-candy-from-snap-benefits/
What could possibly go wrong? We’re on a glide path to utopia!
Based on experiments around here concerning deportations, remove the aliens, wages increase slightly, Americans fill the jobs.
Nobody hire Mexicans because of their “skill”. They are cheap, but stupid workers. I normally hired Americans to do tree work; tried 2 different Mexian companies last times. Night and day differences between the 2 groups; Mexicans just didn’t have a &$#. Last bunch was cutting close to house; I should have know better. The Mexican had 2 major tree chunks whack my house; likely the decking is damaged in both places.
Next time, American only companies. If the crew shows up as Mexicans, I’m trespassing them.
What you described is not just limited to Mexican/Latinos in areas like construction, but is showing everywhere in corporate culture. It’s a symptom of management wanting cheaper labor, but not knowing their business well enough to understand the ramifications of said cheap labor.
My former employer decided to go down this path back in the 00’s and opened the door to non-citizen hiring. Within a year, all innovation stopped and we didn’t have a successful new product ever again. Our managers were too inexperienced and/or clueless to recognize that the people being hired were not capable of doing the work. They were also easily conned by the sycophantic behavior of some of the cultures (Indian and mid-East in particular). Once these foreign scientists got DEI’ed into management positions themselves, then things really began to unravel. Company is now a shell of its former self and isn’t likely to survive too much longer.
Construction is no different. Wife’s coworker had his house burned down because Mexican crew left a bunch of oily rags in a bucket after refinishing hardwood floors. The crew disappeared after the fire (which totalled the house) and so the homeowner had a struggle to get his own insurance to pay.
Well, that would be the case if the construction market was in the process of cratering . . . look out below!
The Based Book Sale is back, everyone. This time, it’s a focused sale on short stories and short story collections, including, for the first time in print, my own “The House of Lamentation.” So if you’d like to stock up some quick reads for $1 each, go check it out.
https://basedbooksale.substack.com/p/based-book-niche-sale-short-stories
Best of luck!
We saw the writing on the wall and listed our marsh house, which is in a resort area Sea island. Backup well with filtration, 700 gals. of rain barrels, small greenhouse, enclosed planting areas, 15 mins. from town on a private road and 5.4 acres to boot. And a barn w/ mother in law above.
Sold in a week. Moving into town (safe, great dining, 15K population and has a 5-Star Dive Bar).
Back in 1976, paid $19/sq ft for my first house. Groceries for a week with a preggie to-be-ex-wife were $40-45. We got $520/sq ft here. Dinner for two is $100 anywhere decent. Up in Charleston, more like $150. Going to see David Allen Coe play tonight.
Both of my daughters (48 & 40) have done OK. Stable marriages, bought their first houses by 25. One buys a dump, they fix it up and move every 4-5 years (no children, sadly). The older has been in the same house for 20 years.
So, it’s not impossible these days for the under 50 crowd. But it’s hard. Nobody wants to sell a house with a fixed 3% rate.
I think you picked a great time to sell. And, we don’t anywhere fancy to eat in Modern Mayberry, but the diner is okay.
I see another angle here and that is how much crime is tolerable. Prices go up as crime goes down geographically. The problem is crime is being excused by the judicial. Younger people were able to move to a more tolerable area in the past. Now there is only rural, very expensive, and gated housing choices because crime is intolerable everywhere in between. Imho this is the uniparty plan for after the reset of a safe police state in soviet style 15 minute city urban utopia.
Crime used to be limited to areas where it was “safe” to do crimes and not cross certain streets. Now, not so much.
Local rural route farmland is now section 8 particle board to the horizon.
A friend of 20 years spent $500,000 to move about 50 miles out after it got too congested and enriched around here.
“Get out of the cities now” starter package, $650,000. Includes free burn barrel so you can bond with your neighbors over Sunday night garbage burning, because rural service is $15/week, after a long day of watching your neighbors cows crap in the creek because their USDA grant money only covered $15k in cross fencing which didn’t free up enough money for the water trough and pump. #paralleleconony
‘This type of mess always sorts itself out’
Always? But Amerika is a Category of One. She is quite unique. For example, streets full of homeless white men decade after decade is a feature, not a bug. They don’t want us working, much less living in houses. They want us degraded, disenfranchised and made an example of for the world to see. Millions living in cars and campers now. While the Five Points was ‘handling’ the housing market. Economic Factors, doncha know!
How did we get here? 19th Amendment, Hart-Cellar Act, monopolistic asshat I mean asset managers (Wall Street, State Street, Vanguard). An elite that sold you out and tanked the dollar and the economy for reasons of mass population control. (Scamdemic — the dollar is still croaking on world markets.) Destroying the family with feminism means TWO people are now competing for the SAME house, the one they used to live in together.
10 Mexicans illegals rent a big house for well above market price because their combined share is peanuts. Millions of times over. CA and the PNW.
I left Amerika a decade ago and you could rent a decent little one-b.r. most places for around a thousand. Exact same place wants $2500 now. For the same shithole, ain’t even been repainted. That’s just greed. Nobody wants dollars here in LatAm, yup even the burro-walking indios know the score.
Single white dood — passed over by the females and of-colors the past 60 years, cannot compete. This is not accidental. This is not the result of explicable economic factors that’ll sort themselves out because they always do. This is war waged against you in a thousand ways. We are a betrayed people, including betrayed by our own.
Act accordingly.
Stop giving me bad feels about the upstream truths of how we got here. I only want cake and eat it too. My daughter is making a fine living as a tradwife influencer selling peptides to chubby city girls who are tired of urban gene shredding and want to find a nice country boy with the $5 million in capital equipment it takes to push up hay on the 100 acres he inherited. Its not that hard to make money. Its just laying around for those willing to hustle.
Oh, the sorting will be painful beyond imagining.
I can only comment on my experience with Gen “Z” and their housing problems. My two both own their homes, worth between $500K and $1Mil. They both did the unthinkable though, They went to school, racked up minimum debt and paid it off quickly, They chose majors that were worth something, didn’t buy fancy cars and didn’t use credit cards. What a way to live.
“Worth” lol. Here’s a tell. “Just learn to be happy with less (than we acquired that was beyond our means but magically worked out for us like a cat making on its paws).
Financial discipline is a lost skill but its been lost for generations now because things are “worth” in the same way a ponzi values assets based on when they enter the pyramid.
Boomer wealth is a product of the largest most debt bloated and manipulated economic expansionism project in human history. Debt consumer overspending systemically bailed out by passive asset inflation on the back of heritage American replacement human ponzi and globohomo vampire asset stripping financial financialization. Yay winning.
The dragging forward of future value into present value and aggregating that into a wealth disparity machine we call an economy is based on a lie. a lie that is coming home.
The biological equivalent is the boom of grand-pet parents celebrating the end of their heritage by liquidating their high-end pet food stock that has tripled for reasons that are conveniently ignored in order to buy another ADU unit to rent out all managed by an app from a deck chair on a cruise shjp.
We curry the lie the same way we all impulsively cite exceptions as the rule in our online dopamine and cope sessions. We want it to continue. Just a bit slower and less tranny than current year. That is the truth. That’s what the transactions aka choices tell us. not my problem if your 1.2 kids are too dumb to have bought a house sometime before now when it was only 4.5x annual income to do so.
Same goes for the social matrix. Keep 90% of progressive egalitarian lies and toss back the ladybois ruining the college sports because strong one and done designer daughter scholarship to goodcollege is the last queue to elons rocketship to mars. Your basement whiteboy is your problem. Good luck with all that.
Excellent!
Gee could this be God’s judgement?
Yes, for sheltering those who “displease God and are enemies to all mankind.”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NKLP1elggcc?feature=share