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The Death of the Family Home is Killing the American Middle Class

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Once renowned for widespread homeownership, the key Anglosphere countries are reverting to a feudal past, where land is owned by increasingly few. In every major market in Canada and Australia, and in much of America and the UK, house prices have skyrocketed to record levels, with corresponding consequences for home ownership rates.

In a new report, demographer Wendell Cox traces this to the failure to build enough new housing units, particularly the single-family homes that consumers most desire. In the United States, homebuilders built about one million fewer homes (including rental units) in 2024 than in 1972 when there were 130 million fewer Americans. One estimate puts the US housing market short by about 4.5 million homes.

But the housing crisis is a global phenomenon that hits the middle and working classes hardest. In large part due to high housing prices, notes the “OECD in Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle-Class”, the middle-class faces ever rising costs relative to incomes, so much so that its very survival is threatened. “The cost of essential parts of the middle-class lifestyle have increased faster than inflation,” it notes. Housing prices have been rising “three times faster than household median income over the last two decades.”

Even in prosperous and communitarian Switzerland, Zurich studios sell for well over $1 million, and small houses for considerably more than that. Even affluent people cannot afford down payments, despite the overwhelming financial advantages to homeowners.

This housing shortfall and high prices are seen throughout the Anglosphere. Australia’s historically high rates of homeownership have all but collapsed among those aged between 25 and 34 years old, plummeting from more than 60 per cent in 1981 to only 45 per cent in 2016. The proportion of owner-occupied housing has dropped by 10 per cent in the last 25 years. In the United Kingdom in 2022-23, 39 per cent of 25-34 year-olds owned their home, compared to 57 per cent of the same age cohort in 1995. A rising proportion of British millennials are likely to remain renters for life.

Similarly, US millennials were already less likely in 2015 to be homeowners than baby boomers and Gen-Xers. By 2021, home ownership among those aged 25-34 had dropped from 45.4 per cent in 2000 to 41.6 per cent. Record numbers of first-time buyers are stuck on the sidelines as housing affordability stands at the lowest level for which there are data series, while one in three pay over 30 per cent of their income in mortgage or rent.

Across the board, Wendell Cox’s new report lays the blame for this situation on the British-born idea of urban containment, with its roots in the UK’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. This policy sought to steer development towards higher density core cities and away from the lower density periphery, forcing people into “living smaller, living closer” – whether they like it or not.

The results have been dreadful. As early as the 1970s, British planner Peter Hall suggested that the “speculative value” of land with planning permission in the UK was five to 10 times higher than that of land without planning permission. Virtually all the most expensive markets in Cox’s new affordability study – outside number one Hong Kong – operate some form of urban containment, including such cities as Vancouver, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and, of course, London.
All these areas now have prices that are nine times or more higher than median incomes, which is also three times the historic rate. Many of the markets closer to that historic norm – in Texas, the South and the Midwest US – do not have such policies.

Nor does focusing on higher density lower prices, as is sometimes argued. In fact, US data suggests a positive correlation between greater density and housing costs. Among 53 major metros, those with more single-family housing and larger lot sizes (key indicators of lower density) have substantially better housing affordability. One recent study found that the median family in San Jose would need 125 years (150 in Los Angeles) to save a down payment; in Atlanta or Houston the figure is 12 years.

Perhaps most damning, these policies are clearly not effective in creating more housing; Portland, a US pioneer in urban containment, embraces high density housing but high prices have driven multi-family construction to the lowest level in a decade. In California, which has experienced similar stagnation, notes a recent RAND study, policy-driven delays, strict architectural standards, green mandates and the requirement to pay union-level wages have pushed the cost of construction of subsidised apartments twice as high as in Texas.

How do we begin to solve this problem? It should not be too difficult, once urban containment and other policies are effectively scrapped. With relatively low population growth – particularly outside the migrant population – there is no huge spike in fundamental demand as occurred, for example, in the 1950s and 1960s. The rise of remote work, migration to smaller urban areas, as well as new technologies for building, including the use of 3D printers, actually offer the chance to build more affordable housing.

The bad news is that this crisis is largely self-inflicted. The good news is that it can be solved, if our political class can find the will to change and jettison policies that have led to this disastrous situation.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Why Cities Have Lost Their Appeal

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Over the past half century, media and academic sources repeatedly suggested that increasingly dense cities would dominate the future. Places such as London, San Francisco and Chicago would dominate an economy.

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Blue State Housing Crisis is Costing Democrats Voters

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Amid the talk about tariffs and other Trumpian foibles, little attention has been paid to America’s festering housing crisis. This could prove a more lasting political issue in the US, as well as throughout much of the West.

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Donald Trump has Scrambled the Old Class Allegiances

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US president Donald Trump has disrupted the nature of class politics. In a reversal of long-standing allegiances, working-class Americans – including many minorities – have shifted towards the MAGA right. Read more

Bad News for American Doomers

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It’s once more springtime for America doomers, those who believe the United States will soon lose its global top-dog status. Much of this is in reaction to the poorly considered ramblings of President Trump. Read more

The Sun Belt Will Save Europe

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Florence. No city on earth is a more miraculous testament to what entrepreneurs can do, and how hard work and grit can build beauty that endures. Yet as he looks out, over the red roofs and graceful churches of the Tuscan gem, Mattia Guidi sees less a glorious past, and more a stagnating present. “Tourism has a dual effect,” the political scientist at the University of Siena tells me. “Some benefit but there’s not a lot of opportunity.”

It’s a fair point. For if tourism powers the bloc’s otherwise torpid economy, more galleries and restaurants is not what Europe needs. Squeezed by a conservative business culture, and an elephantine welfare state, genuine entrepreneurs increasingly seek exile in the Anglosphere, while the workers that remain wallow in low-paying service jobs. Especially as the shock of Trumpism forces the continent to defend its fading interests, it’s a recipe for economic catastrophe, with the EU expected to encompass just one tenth of global GDP by 2100.

Yet if the Old World needs to reclaim the magic of the Medici, the continent’s redemption will come far from Florence. Rather, Europe’s periphery is leading the way, with places like Portugal and Greece offering sunny business prospects dashed with pleasant weather. Combined with similar dynamism in the former communist states of eastern Europe, it’s increasingly possible to talk of a European Sun Belt. For just like the former Confederacy, once disdained and now booming, the continent’s future will be made on its edges — if, that is, the EU’s reactionary status quo can finally be vanquished.

Europe’s economy is broken. Over the past 15 years, the Eurozone has grown about 6% in dollar terms. The US has jumped 82%. The biggest gap is in tech: of the top 50 tech firms, only three are located in Europe, with the list unsurprisingly dominated by Silicon Valley. Not that Europe’s entrepreneurial deficit is not only in ones and zeros. MIT researcher Andrew McAfee has shown how, over the last 50 years, the US has created “from scratch” companies with market cap of over $10 billion five times faster than the EU. No wonder some observers now quip that Europe is “a museum as a continent and a museum as a stock market”.

Faced with this malaise, and geopolitical upheavals from Kyiv to the White House, it’s little wonder that Europe’s leaders, in Paris and Berlin, are rushing to reindustrialise. That’s clear enough militarily, with the Bundestag promising €500 billion for new tanks and missiles. Yet if the German defence minister claims his countrymen have an “erotic relationship” with weapons — and we agree that bolstered self-sufficiency is necessary given Trump’s rising isolationism — it’s unlikely that Europe can thrive in the 21st century through force-of-arms alone.

Certainly, you shouldn’t count on Brussels, prime mover of the continent’s decline, to reverse the slide to irrelevance. Mario Draghi’s much-ballyhooed response to the current crisis followed the old patterns of green obsessions, social “inclusion” and ever greater conformity with Brussels edicts. Europe’s grandees believe that money fleeing Trumpian chaos will head to a permanent economic shift towards the Old World. But that ignores the fact that Europe is far more dependent on exports than the US, and lacks new industries that can compete with either America or the rising powers of the developing world.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Architas, via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

‘American Oasis’ Review: The Lure of the Desert

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Hating the Southwest, particularly its burgeoning cities such as Phoenix, is de rigueur in American media. Jon Stewart has called Arizona “the meth lab of democracy.” Hunter S. Thompson described hell as an “overcrowded version of Phoenix.” Fran Lebowitz, the epitome of New York progressive arrogance, said: “I don’t think anyone needs Arizona. . . . Putin: here take Arizona, leave Ukraine.”

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Ignore the Bluster — Donald Trump is Not an Imperialist

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US president Donald Trump’s MAGA brand of foreign policy has been treated with contempt and consternation by much of the world. He has incited the ire of neoliberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama, as well as many European intellectuals, who rarely have much positive to say about America anyway. To them, Trump epitomises a destructive American arrogance and imperial delusions.

Whatever he may think of himself, Donald Trump is no Augustan figure, no colossus ready to conquer the known world. He is a phenomenon borne of concern about American decline, ranging from failing education levels and massive debt to frayed national coherence and fading industrial, even military, supremacy. He is driven not by imperial ambitions (despite his absurd claims about acquiring Greenland and Canada), but rather in response to the consequences of recent imperial overreach.

The old US foreign policy, argues secretary of state Marco Rubio, is ‘obsolete’. Attempts to reshape the world through unrestrained globalisation and foreign interventions have not only failed, he says, but are now also a ‘weapon being used against us’.

Even the name of Trump’s movement, MAGA, says it all. Make America Great Again implies that it is not so great now. Trump’s promised ‘golden age’, if it arrives at all, will be forged in a new mercantilist era that has been gradually embraced as well in Europe and supercharged by China’s drive to world preeminence.

Right now, America looks dominant largely because its traditional competitors – like the UK, Japan and the EU – are all suffering markedly worse economic and demographic crises. By 2050, the populations of Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Spain are all expected to drop significantly. Even China suffers from a diminishing workforce, an overreliance on manufactured exports, mass alienation among the young and educated, a massive real-estate collapse and capital flight.

However, other nations’ problems do not make America less vulnerable. The US’s own population growth has also slowed, and recent economic trends have mostly benefitted the affluent and those working for the government. The top 10 per cent of all earners now account for half of all spending. This is well above the roughly one-third of three decades ago. Partially this comes as many of the companies historically tied to high wages – US Steel, General Motors, RCA, Xerox, Intel and Boeing – have either disappeared or markedly declined.

Read the rest of this piece: Spiked.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr under CC0 2.0 License.

California Now at the Heart of the Battle Against Woke Anti-Semitism

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When affirmative action, the predecessor of DEI, was first implemented in the early 1970s, the goal was to address cruel centuries of oppression of African Americans. It was widely supported by many white Americans, who saw it as a short-term palliative.

But in recent years, affirmative action has merged with a more radical academic dogma known as “critical race theory”. At its core, this belief system deplores America as a racist confection, a country that will never be able to address its evils without abandoning the merit system and the notion of fair play. Critical race theory (CRT) has grown into a lucrative industry, as schools, companies and governments raced to implement DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) policies and imposed Mao-like struggle sessions on employees to hold the party line.

Today, thankfully, CRT now faces a serious decline. Theoretician Ibrahim X Kendi recently closed his Boston University “anti-racist research” centre, moving it to Howard. President Trump seems determined to wipe out CRT and DEI among anyone in the federal orbit, which could include the very universities that nurtured it. The administration is perfectly aware that DEI and CRT policies are widely unpopular among most Americans.

One contributor to the backlash has been how CRT ideology has shifted activists towards ever more radical politics, particularly with regard to Israel and Jewish Americans. In California, an incoming new “ethnic studies” curriculum for schools has been accused of categorising all white people, no matter their origins, as enjoying “white privilege”. In this world-view, groups like Jews do not suffer discrimination, which might have come as a surprise to our immigrant forebears as well as to those who are still facing anti-Semitism today.

Throughout academia, DEI and other race-based programmes have emerged as fulcrums of anti-Israel, and often anti-Semitic action. Even on my normally sane campus, our DEI unit at Chapman awarded this year’s Dr Martin Luther King Jr Community Service Award to the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

Given numerous instances of harassment of Jewish students and the SJP’s celebration of the October 7 pogrom, this was clearly absurd. Our President, Daniele Struppa, effectively rescinded the order, apologising to Jewish students and faculty, to the horror of many at the school’s ultra-woke Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

In California, Jewish legislators are campaigning to keep CRT’s pernicious influence contained, and to mitigate the worst consequences of the new “ethnic studies” guidelines. But the CRT radicals remain deeply entrenched and well-placed within school bureaucracies and the teacher’s unions. Many blue states still embrace policies that discriminate on the basis of race and gender. The Biden administration to its shame promoted critical race theory. Much the same has occurred in the likes of Minnesota.

So even as Trump and his allies seek to counter DEI and CRT, it’s going to be a tough struggle at some elite universities. In some cases, anti-Jewish sentiment is widespread. Jewish students face professors hectoring against Israel and demonstrators who have blocked off access to school buildings for “Zionists”. Erwin Chemerinsky, Berkeley’s Law School dean and well-known progressive, wrote in the LA Times that “nothing has prepared me for the anti-Semitism” now clearly evident at Berkeley and other campuses.

Despite these outrages, it won’t be easy to remove these antics. Already some universities are rallying to keep discriminatory practices, even in red states. Their oligarchic funding is unlikely to run out in the near future. At least until Trump, Leftist activism was often subsidized by federal taxes, something the public had little notion about.

In the long term, however, the decline of CRT should mark a step towards a society closer to Dr King’s ethos, particularly critical for a country that may become predominantly non-white by mid-century. Crowing about the end of “the US white majority” might be popular in ethnic studies departments but has not translated into a better life for most minorities. America’s great strength is that it was not founded on the basis of any particular ethnicity and has successfully evolved to become more inclusive; a fundamentally racist society would not be such a lure for new Latin American, African or Asian immigrants.

Getting rid of DEI, CRT and their offsprings is one step towards this new post-racial future. It represents the rejection of the sectarianism preached by “racial justice” activists in the West, Hamas and other jihadis, and by far-Right sectarians across the West. America, indeed, all of Western society, needs not more separation but more unforced integration.

CRT needs to be returned to the obscurity of its origins in the university hothouse. What is needed instead is a commitment to help raise people from poor circumstances, whichever race they happen to be. True social justice cannot be accomplished by turning people against one another.

This piece first appeared at Telegraph.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: N. Papes, USA Today

Tech Bros Have Stolen Austin’s Soul

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It looms, all glamour and glass, like a strange Wellsian monster. Floor by floor it comes, casting the Colorado River in shadow as it goes. By the time it’s finished, sometime next year, it’ll be the tallest building in Texas, at 74 stories beating Houston’s JP Morgan Chase Tower by almost 20 feet. Yet even more than its scale, it’s the amenities at the Waterline Apartments that really impress.

This, after all, is a place that promises a new Austin, one, its marketers say, that offers “serenity in the sky”. There’ll be restaurants, and retail, and a hotel complete with swimming pool and spa. Far from a repeat of The War of the Worlds, then, the Waterline speaks to another H.G. Wells fantasy, one the writer envisaged as “a great gallery” where people could meet and live in harmony. Nor is it alone. There are 13 similar high-rises coming right across Austin, as its population rises and GDP soars.

This emerging urban Austin, a place of towers and cocktail bars, is fundamentally different from the established centres of the East and Midwest. In beehives like Wall Street or The Loop, office workers historically came in to work, then retreated back to the suburbs each night. Downtown Austin, though, puts residents at its hearts, focusing less on offices and more on lifestyles. Yet if that means amenities galore, this tidy vision risks redefining American cities for the worse — even as the old problems of urban dysfunction always loom.

For decades, the Texan capital was synonymous with a single word: weird. Unlike the conservative countryside, or else oil towns like Dallas, the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Austin was a place of lively bars and soul-filled clubs. There was Rainey Street, too, a charming Latino neighbourhood filled with pretty tree-lined cottages. When I first came here, almost half a century ago, I was reminded of nothing less than Haight-Ashbury — the San Francisco neighbourhood so beloved among artists and hippies.

Now, though, this older, shabbier Austin is slipping away. Quite aside from landmark developments like the Waterline, that’s clear enough in the numbers. Since 2000, downtown’s population has tripled to 15,000. In large part, in fact, Kevin Burns argues the ultra-modern vibe can be understood by sheer demand, with the rising forest of towers appealing to young professionals tired of life in the suburbs. “The driver is quality of life,” says the bearded 47-year-old real-estate developer, sipping a coffee as the sound of construction echoes around us.

It’s not hard to see what he means. Life by the Colorado, still feverishly in the making, is pleasantly walkable. There are yew-scattered parklands, and bike lanes and creeks. It’s all surely a step up from the convention centres and stadiums that once got urban developers excited. There’s also plenty to do: dozens of bars and restaurants open in Austin every month, dovetailed by yoga studios and comedy clubs. Yet if the new Austin promises paradise for wealthy hipsters, the hippies of yore seem far less welcome. Downtown, after all, is expensive, hardly surprising when so many of the new arrivals are tech workers, “empty nesters” with far fewer children to feed than their peers elsewhere. An apartment in the sky here will set you back $170,000 more than other parts of Central Texas, doubtless explaining why so many new downtowners are white.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Randy von Liski via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.