A household under 35 in 1994 had a 37.4% chance of owning the roof over its head. By 2004 that had climbed to 43.1%. Then it fell for twelve straight years, bottoming at 34.6% in 2016. Today it is 37.1%.[1] Three decades on, the young American household is slightly less likely to own a home than it was when the Census Bureau started keeping the series.
The country added roughly 30 million foreign-born residents between 1990 and 2024, taking the foreign-born population from 19.8 million to 50.2 million.[5] It did not add housing, entry-level professional jobs, or urban land at anything close to that rate. A house, a wage that outruns the rent, and room for children all became harder to reach for the households that had not yet bought in.
A house costs 5.6 years of income
The national ratio of median home value to median household income was 3.0 in 1990. It is 5.6 now.[2] A family that once needed three years of gross income to cover a house now needs more than five and a half.
The increase is concentrated. Across all 54 metropolitan areas with more than a million residents, the nine where a home costs six times median income or more average 29.6% foreign-born. The twenty-one where a home costs less than four times income average 9.1% foreign-born.[3] San Jose runs 9.3 times income at 40.3% foreign-born. Pittsburgh runs 2.9 times income at 4.1% foreign-born.
Immigrants do not arrive evenly either. About 64% of all foreign-born residents live in just 20 metropolitan areas.[6] Those are the same metros where the price of a house separated from local wages, and they are also the metros where building is hardest, which is why the demand lands on price instead of on supply.
Rent takes the down payment
A household that cannot buy pays rent, and what it pays in rent decides how fast it can stop renting.
In Orlando, median gross rent takes 28.6% of median household income. In Miami it takes 27.1%, in San Diego 26.6%, in Los Angeles 26.3%.[3] In St. Louis it takes 17.0% and in Pittsburgh 17.1%. The gap between those two groups is roughly ten cents of every dollar a household earns, and it is the same money that would otherwise accumulate toward a down payment. A renter in Orlando puts aside ten cents less on the dollar than a renter in St. Louis, against a house that costs 4.5 times income rather than 3.3.
This is why the under-35 ownership rate sits near 37%. Each year the rent takes the money that would have become a deposit, and each year the price of the house rises faster than what is left over.
Half the labor-force growth came from abroad
The American labor force grew by 18.8 million people between 2005 and 2024. Foreign-born workers accounted for 10.3 million of that increase, more than half. Their share of everyone working or looking for work went from 14.8% to 19.2%.[4]
An employer facing that market has more room to set the wage. The H-1B program is where this is easiest to measure, because the government publishes what the jobs pay. Homeland Security counted the cap-subject petitions filed from 2020 through 2024 and found 28% at Level 1 and 55% at Level 2, the two prevailing-wage tiers that sit below the local median for the occupation. Level 3, the median, took 12%. Level 4 took 5%.[7] Eighty-three percent of new H-1B jobs are offered below what the same job pays locally, and the agency wrote that finding into the rule that replaced the H-1B lottery with wage-weighted selection.
A firm that can fill a desk at the 34th percentile has no reason to bid up an American for the same desk, and no reason to train one.
Who is holding the wealth
The Federal Reserve tracks how the country's household wealth is divided, quarterly, back to 1989. Households headed by someone under 40 held 11.9% of it at the end of 1989. They hold 6.6% now.[9] Households headed by someone 70 or over went from 19.1% to 32.7%. Part of that shift is an older country with fewer young households in the first place, so the gap is not all economic.
The split by wealth is not open to that objection. The richest 10% of households held 60.9% of all household net worth in 1989 and hold 67.9% today. The bottom half held 3.4% and now holds 2.5%. The 40% in the middle, which is where most homeowners sit, fell from 35.7% to 29.6%.[9] The middle lost six points of the country's wealth and the top tenth gained seven.
Births fall where housing costs most
The cost lands last on whether a household has children at all.
Fertility in the 54 large metros tracks housing cost downward. In the nine metros at six times income or more, women average 1.63 children over a lifetime. In the twenty-one under four times income, they average 1.78.[3] The correlation across all 54 is -0.46: real, and one factor among several.
Not one metropolitan area over a million people reaches the 2.10 replacement rate. The cheapest large metros in the country are not producing enough children to hold their populations steady either. Cheap housing no longer buys a replacement-level birth rate; it buys 1.78 instead of 1.63.
Tulsa, at 3.6 times income, records 2.07 children per woman. San Jose, at 9.3 times income, records 1.45.[3]
Recommendations
Congress sets how many people are admitted each year. It raised that number from 270,000 to 675,000 in 1990 and has not lowered it since. Every fix below is legislative, because the current reduction rests on executive orders that end with the administration that issued them.
- Replace the Immigration Act of 1990. Lower the annual cap from 675,000 to roughly 200,000, in line with the 1924-1965 average that preceded the second wave, and eliminate the Diversity Visa lottery.
- Repeal the H-1B program and replace it with an exceptional-talent visa capped below 10,000 a year, with a salary floor above the 95th percentile of the local wage for the occupation. End Optional Practical Training, which supplies roughly 230,000 work authorizations a year outside any cap.
- Narrow family-based admission to spouses and minor children of citizens, ending the chain through adult siblings and parents that multiplies each admission.
- Write the country-level restrictions and the annual number into law rather than proclamation. The 1924 Act held for 41 years because Congress passed it; a proclamation ends the day the next president signs a different one.
Sources
- U.S. Census Bureau, Housing Vacancies and Homeownership, Table 19: Homeownership Rates by Age of Householder
- Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University, "Home Price-to-Income Ratio Reaches Record High"
- U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (median home value, median household income, median gross rent, foreign-born share by metro, 2023; table B13016 births in the past 12 months by age, 2024 five-year estimates)
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, foreign-born and total civilian labor force, annual averages
- U.S. Census Bureau, Foreign-Born Population
- Migration Policy Institute, "U.S. Immigrant Population by Metropolitan Area"
- Department of Homeland Security, Weighted Selection Process for Cap-Subject H-1B Petitions, final rule, 90 Fed. Reg. 60864 (Dec. 29, 2025)
- Immigration Act of 1990, Pub. L. 101-649
- Federal Reserve Board, Distributional Financial Accounts, net worth shares by wealth percentile and by age of head, 1989 Q3 to 2026 Q1