The Housing Crisis

Amid the growing cost of living crisis, Marxist firebrand Zohran Mamdani has been elected to the position of Mayor of New York. Mamdani’s popularity, which is based largely on unease about prices, most notably rents, augurs a possible American turn towards radical collectivism.

Mamdani’s brand of leftist politics is not socialism as practised, for example, in Sweden, which never nationalised its main industries, embraced home ownership and whose welfare state was financed by a dynamic export-oriented economy. The founder of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the late Michael Harrington, would barely recognise his offspring. He warned against Leninist control of the “commanding heights” of the economy, detested communism and its Third World offshoots, and supported Israel’s right to exist. The current DSA and its supporters, as writer Pamela Paul points out, believe that “capitalism isn’t something to be regulated or balanced, but is itself the problem.”

So, how did leftist socialism become a force in the politics of the capitalist heartland? Housing is the key, which is by far the biggest contributor to inflationary concerns. Overall, young Americans rank housing as their top financial concern, and they worry that they may not attain the foundations of middle-class life, most notably, spacious and affordable housing. This concern is rooted in reality. An Institute for Family Studies report published in March 2025, found that since 1970, the share of young adults who own the home they live in has declined from fifty percent to around 25–30 percent.

Housing concerns are not restricted to America. In Ireland, only a third of millennials own a home, compared with homeownership rates of almost two-thirds for baby boomers at the same age. At least a third of British millennials are likely to remain renters permanently; only a third of millennials own a home, compared with almost two-thirds of baby boomers at the same age.

Even countries with huge land masses are experiencing the same trends. In Australia, homeownership among 25–34-year-olds dropped from more than sixty percent in 1981 to only 45 percent in 2016. The proportion of owner-occupied housing has dropped by ten percent in the last 25 years. In Canada, home to two of the world’s most unaffordable cities, Toronto and Vancouver, the number of people aged between 18 and 34 (a demographic that is also suffering from declining incomes) who own a home has declined from 47 percent in 2021 to 26 percent today, according to a 2024 Scotiabank housing poll. The persistent rise in housing prices, notes the OECD in a 2019 report, means that “the middle class faces ever-rising costs relative to incomes and that its survival is threatened.” Owned housing prices, it notes, “have been [rising] three times faster than household median income over the last two decades.”

This is a crisis that our capitalist elites seem ill-equipped to address. Bill Pulte, Donald Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency director, has tried to respond by offering such tricks as the widely debunked idea of fifty-year mortgages. Placing future generations on the line for loans incurred by their parents seems both palpably unfair and likely to be impracticable and it would force owners and their offspring to pay even more in interest. Even the usually MAGA-friendly Breitbart has suggested that such an approach “offers not so much affordability as illusion.”

Some libertarians offer a solution of sorts, which is to end zoning, thus giving developers free rein in historically lower-density neighbourhoods. This is unpopular even in California, where, according to a poll by former Obama campaign pollster David Binder, a large majority opposed legislation signed by Governor Newsom in 2021 that, in effect, banned single-family zoning in much of the state. Some libertarians also openly support the movement of Wall Street firms such as Blackstone and the UK’s Lloyds Bank into buying homes in hot markets to turn them into rentals, thus boosting home prices and laying the foundations for what they claim will be a future “rentership” society.

Read the rest of this piece at Quillette.

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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.

Homepage Photo: Mark Klotz via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.