For over a decade now, I've been hearing friends say things like, "it's impossible for young people to buy a home today."

But is it?

Median Homeowner Age

The median homeowner age was 47 in 1960. It fell for a while but has been slowly climbing since 1990 and is now almost 53.

One reason for this is that people are living longer. Baby boomers began to enter adulthood in 1964. Life expectancy has increased by about 10 years since then. Older adults are now "aging in place," living in their homes and staying independent for as long as possible.

Another reason for the age shift is that more young people are going to college. College enrollment has grown from 45% in 1960 to 63% today. A larger proportion of young people are deferring their first home purchase until after they've finished their education, which pushes the median homeowner age upward.

Homeownership by Age

While there has been a decline in homeownership rates for most age groups in recent decades, this has been a gradual change with ups and downs. 35- to 45-year-olds have seen the largest drop. For homeowners under the age of 35, annual homeownership rates have remained relatively flat, hovering around 40% since 1970.

For homeowners under 35, the 2025 rate is nearly identical to what the rate was during a downturn back in the mid 90s.

Age	1994	2025
65+	77.4%	78.6%
55–64	79.3%	75.9%
45–54	75.2%	69.8%
35–44	64.5%	60.8%
< 35	37.3%	37.0%

A more granular breakdown of homeowners under the age of 50 shows that things have been improving since a low point in 2016. Younger householders have been fueling that increase, and those under 25 have actually been doing better this century than in the 1980s and '90s.

For over forty years now the ownership rate has shown a consistent pattern of being higher for older age brackets. This makes sense. As people age, they tend to learn new skills, gain more experience, and earn more money. They've also had more time to save for a down payment. That was true in the 1980s and it's still true today.

Here again is a comparison of the current rates with 1994, this time broken down by homeowners under age 50. The rates are slightly lower for most age groups, though they have improved for those under 25.

Age	1994	2025
45–49	73.8%	68.5%
40–44	68.2%	64.4%
35–39	61.2%	57.4%
30–34	50.6%	46.6%
25–29	34.1%	33.3%
< 25	14.9%	24.2%

First-Time Homebuyer Age

In late 2025, many news outlets cited a National Association of Realtors (NAR) survey which estimated that the median first-time homebuyer age had reached an all-time high of 40. However, NAR's data is out of line with Census Bureau data and according to Redfin the "typical first-time homebuyer was 35 years old in 2025, down from 36 the year before and down from a peak of 38 in 2018."

The American Enterprise Institute puts the number even lower. Using anonymized mortgage loan data to determine the median age of first-time homebuyers, they estimate that for the first quarter of 2026 the median age of first-time buyers obtaining a loan was 33. Loan data also show that the median age of first-time homeowners has been under 35 for the past twenty years.

Affordability

So far we've seen that the median homeowner age has risen slightly in the past 30 years, young people are still buying homes at roughly the same rate they always have, and Census and loan data show that first-time buyers still tend to be in their mid-thirties. What about cost?

The Federal Housing Finance Agency's (FHFA) House Price Index (HPI) measures the average price changes in single-family homes. HPI measures the rate of appreciation or depreciation rather than a specific dollar amount. USAFacts has some great interactive charts comparing the changes in HPI and wages over time.

If you start the clock in 1990, changes to wages have outpaced house prices:

If you start in 2000, house prices have outpaced wages:

If you start in 2005, it's the reverse:

If you start in 2010, it's the reverse again:

And so far, that trend has continued ever since. Even though housing costs have been outpacing wages for over 15 years now, does this mean that mean that homes are unaffordable or "impossible" to purchase?

One way to try to measure affordability over time is to examine the price-to-income ratio. The median home price was about 4 times the median household income back in the late '80s and early '90s. It's about 5 to 6 times the median household income today.

You'll sometimes see this metric in stories about how housing is becoming unaffordable. But there are several problems with using price-to-income to gauge affordability.

First, housing prices and incomes vary greatly by region. In the Midwest, median home prices tend to be lower, and median incomes tend to be higher than the national values. If we compute the price-to-income ratio just for the Midwest, then the upward trend is much more gradual. For the Midwest the median home price was 3.3 times the median family income in 1993, and it still was in 2020.

The Midwest has consistently had higher homeownership rates than other regions of the country for more than half a century.

The second and more important problem with the price-to-income ratio is that it doesn't take into consideration the impact of lending costs. Mortgage rates have an enormous impact on the actual cost of purchasing a home.

The average mortgage rate in 1984 was 13.88%. The median home price was $79,900. Even with a down payment of 20%, the total interest owed on a 30-year loan was $206,549 which is 2.6 times the home price itself.

The average mortgage rate in 2025 was 6.66% and the median home price was $417,400. If a buyer took out a 30-year loan with a 20% down payment, then the total interest would be $438,590 which is 1.1 times the home price.

While it's true that loans can be refinanced over time, most of the interest is paid on the front-end. At a rate of 13.88%, in the first year of payments, $8,863 goes toward interest and just $153 goes toward the principal. The mortgage rate at the time of purchase has a significant impact. And although there is a mortgage interest tax deduction, that mostly benefits wealthy households—about 75% of this tax break goes to households with incomes over $200,000 a year.

Mortgage rates fell from 1981 through 2021. They have begun to rise again in recent years but remain significantly lower than they were in the '80s and early '90s.

To get a better picture of the true cost of owning a home, instead of looking at the price-to-income ratio, we can look at the percentage of income that would be spent on a mortgage payment. To estimate this, let's say that homebuyers make a 20% down payment and take out a 30-year loan at the historical average rate. This is just a rough estimate—not everyone needs financing, some people get better rates for shorter loans, etc.—but this will give a rough idea of what the typical loan burden would have been.

For example, in 1984 a 30-year loan for the median home price of $79,900 at the historical rate of 13.88% with a 20% down payment would have had an annual payment of $9,016 (ignoring PMI, taxes, etc.) which was 40% of the median income of $22,420. If we perform this same evaluation for each year in the four decades that followed, we have a downward trend.

In a blog post from 2023, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis noted that the percentage of disposable personal income spent on mortgage debt service payments had been falling since 2010 and continued to remain low even as mortgage rates started to edge back up in recent years.

Houses Are Better Today

Another factor that complicates housing cost comparisons is that homes built today aren't the same as homes built decades ago. They're bigger and have more amenities.

Back when I first started looking for a home, I was drawn to historic neighborhoods where I enjoyed walking and biking, where it was pleasant and the architecture was stylish. Yet touring these beautiful old houses, I regularly noticed what they lacked. Many had no air conditioning and the insulation was poor. They often had no garage or a detached garage without power. There were fewer bedrooms than modern homes and very limited closet space.

In 1960, 16.8% of homes still lacked complete plumbing. By 1990 that number had dropped to 1.1%.

In the mid-1970s, less than half of new single-family houses had air conditioning. Now 98% have do.

In 1973, 40% of new single-family homes had one and a half bathrooms or less. In 2025, 95% had two or more bathrooms. Likewise, the number of bedrooms has grown. And the median square footage has risen by about 55%.

Homeownership Isn't Easy

I'm not arguing that homeownership is easily obtainable for everyone. Just that it's not impossible.

I purchased my first home on my own at the age of 27. Prior to that, I lived with roommates or in small, inexpensive apartments. My goal had been to avoid having to pay private mortgage insurance, so I budgeted and gradually set aside money for over 5 years until I had enough funds available for a 20% down payment. It took some discipline, but it was manageable.

I'm lucky that I live in the Midwest where housing is more affordable. I'm also lucky that I had access to a mortgage rate that was much lower than in the past century.

Each generation has its challenges, from high mortgage rates to high home prices. The data doesn't back the catastrophic view that young people can no longer afford homes. The low expectation that the young can't meet the challenges of their generation hasn't stopped them from doing so.

Consider the following photograph.

Or how about this creepy one?

You're probably thinking that someone was having a little bit of fun with double exposures. But a long time ago, these photos were presented as evidence of ghosts.

Spirit photography began in the early 1860s. Patrons would sit for their photograph and the picture that developed would include additional ghostly figures, often draped in flowing cloth. The photographer would assert that these were "spirit extras" or ghosts of deceased relatives.

One such photographer, Édouard Isidore Buguet, was tried for fraud in the 1870s. He confessed to using double exposures. And authorities obtained the props that he used:

The police seized all the paraphernalia in the studio of Buguet and took it to court. Amongst it was a lay figure and a large stock of heads. These with dolls and assistants at the studio took turns as inspirations for Spirit extras.

And yet, his victims continued to believe they had experienced something supernatural. In his book, A Magician Among the Spirits, Harry Houdini notes that:

Witness after witness—journalist, photographic expert, musician, merchant, man of letters, optician, ex-professor of history, Colonel of Artillery, etc., etc.—came forward to testify on behalf of the accused.

Shockingly, this type of photographic trickery continued for decades. As late as the 1920s, people like author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were still publicly professing a belief that cameras could capture images of the supernatural. But skeptics like Houdini pushed back, making efforts to debunk various forms of Spiritualism. To demonstrate that spirit photographs were hoaxes, Houdini produced his own, like this one where he convenes with the "ghost" of Abraham Lincoln.

Today it's obvious that these kinds of photos are fakes. As cameras became more prevalent, people became more familiar with them and with effects like double exposures and lens flares.

But the mystery of the unfamiliar photograph lives on. Earlier this month, the Pentagon released a collection of declassified files related to reports of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Public figures like Bill Maher have expressed a belief that aliens are involved. While skeptics like Michael Shermer push back, noting that "absolutely nothing stands out beyond the usual blurry photographs, grainy videos, artist reconstructions, and countless stories about weird things in the sky and in space."

Similar to how difficult it was to understand the first superimposed photographs back in the 1860s, it's hard to understand the optical illusions that are a part of air and space travel today. Pilot and astronaut Scott Kelly has discussed just how challenging it can be:

In my experience of flying over 15,000 hours in 30 something years in airplanes and in space, the environment that we fly in is very conducive to optical illusions...
 
My brother Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and also now a U.S. Senator, shared a story with me about an experience he had years ago that when he was the commander of STS 124; they were getting ready to close the payload bay doors of the Space Shuttle and they see something in the payload bay and they thought it was a tool, maybe a bolt—they couldn’t quite figure it out—and they were potentially going to have to go and do a spacewalk to retrieve it. But before they did that my brother grabbed the camera and they took a picture of it, and when they blew up the picture they realized that this is not a bolt or a tool in the payload bay; it was actually the International Space Station that was 80 miles away.
 
There are cases where pilots have rendezvoused on a buoy because they thought that was their wingman. It’s just a very very challenging environment to work, especially at night.

In another hundred years, will people look back and laugh at how anyone ever thought UAP footage represented aliens? I think that's likely. It's also likely we'll be on the edge of yet another unknown frontier, with another set of unfamiliar photographs that we don't yet fully understand.

In March 2022, software developers Jeff Atwood and John Carmack made a $10k charity bet on the following proposition:

By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities.

Carmack bet that we would have level 5 cars by 2030. This means cars that are fully autonomous and able to drive everywhere in all conditions.

Atwood bet against, writing:

To be clear, I am betting against because I think everyone is underestimating how difficult fully autonomous driving really is. I am by no means against self driving vehicles in any way!

Four years later, just over halfway through the bet, it looks like Atwood has a good chance of winning.

The Blackout

Driverless taxis currently operate at SAE level 4. Their service is restricted to specific areas within certain cities and they aren't fully autonomous. Whenever a Waymo robotaxi gets into a situation it can't figure out, the car requests "remote assistance", where a human call center agent advises the vehicle on how to proceed. There are roughly 40 cars to every human assistant. Half of these remote workers are located in the Philippines.

In December, a power outage in San Francisco caused Waymo's fleet of robotaxis to stop mid-traffic for hours, blocking roads and obstructing emergency vehicles. Waymo's post mortem indicated that while their cars can navigate through disabled traffic lights, they sometimes request confirmation before proceeding. During the power outage there was a backlog of confirmation requests which left many cars frozen in place.

This problem could have been much worse if there had been more driverless taxis on the road—there are currently only about 800 to 1,000 Waymos in operation in San Francisco.

"Edge Cases"

Self-driving vehicles continue to fail in numerous other ways.

Last September in Phoenix, Waymos got stuck in flooded streets. Of course, some human drivers may do this as well, but you can warn people about dangerous levels of flooding and most are able to avoid problem areas. Because of the nature of machine learning, you can't just tell the robotaxis to watch out for flooding. Waymo's solution was to temporarily suspend service of all cars in the Phoenix area.

In December, a Waymo drove into an active crime scene in LA. Several police cruisers had their lights flashing, police had weapons drawn, and officers were yelling at the Waymo to leave the area as it slowly drove within a few feet of a suspect who was lying on the ground.

In January, a Waymo drove down the light rail tracks in Phoenix while a light rail car was approaching. And in March, in two separate instances in Austin, a Waymo stopped within railroad crossing gates, just a few feet away from a passing train.

Last month in Austin, a Waymo got stuck after trying to make a u-turn and ended up blocking an ambulance that was responding to a mass shooting.

The cars have also gotten stuck driving in circles, taken unexplained detours into parking garages, and trapped passengers inside.

These types of situations are often referred to as "edge cases". An edge case is a set of extreme conditions which can cause unexpected failure in a system. This isn't a very fitting description though, since obeying police officers and not driving on train tracks are fundamental driving requirements. So is understanding what a school bus is.

School Bus Failures

Waymo has been struggling for months now trying to get its cars to stop illegally passing school buses that have a flashing stop sign extended.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a probe into Waymo last October after one of its cars passed a stopped school bus in Atlanta. Waymo issued a recall and stated that it had repaired affected vehicles in November. But the problem persisted and as of early December there had been 20 similar incidents at the Austin Independent School District. The school district hosted a half-day event in mid-December to try to help Waymo collect data to fix the issue. But by mid-January at least four more school-bus-passing incidents had taken place. And another incident occurred in March.

There is also an open investigation for a separate incident in which a Waymo struck a child near an elementary school in January.

If a human driver continued to rack up repeat offenses of not stopping for school buses, their license would be suspended. This hasn't happened yet for Waymo, perhaps because people believe these cars will eventually be safer than humans.

Safety

Waymo claims to be "already making roads safer." Their data show a reduction in injury-causing crashes and fewer airbag deployments when compared to human drivers in similar driving areas.

But even though Waymo's cars have driven more than 100 million miles, that's not enough to make statistically meaningful conclusions about fatal crash rates. According to a RAND Corporation study:

... fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their safety in terms of fatalities and injuries.

So far, most of the miles driven by AVs have been at low speeds on urban roads in moderate climates. Waymo has only recently started offering freeway service. Occupant fatalities are more likely at higher speeds, so a new edge case on freeways could quickly negate their safety gains.

Current safety numbers ignore all of the recent close calls. The next time a Waymo goes beyond a railroad crossing gate, it could derail a train. The next time a Waymo drives past a stopped school bus, it could run over a child. The next time there's a major power outage, Waymos stuck in traffic could prevent a fire truck from getting to a fire. If an event like this occurs, it would be tragic but unsurprising.

AVs also introduce unique dangers. Remote assistance is a potential attack vector. Waymo's remote human assistants aren't able to directly control vehicles, which limits risk. But other companies like Tesla allow remote control. Will malicious actors ever be able to hack the remote assist functionality? Or the over-the-air software updates?

The Future

I'm skeptical that level 5 self-driving cars will be available by 2030. There are currently too many unhandled situations that require remote assistance. Waymo is under multiple federal investigations. And a particularly bad accident could cause a major setback. It's hard to picture how we could possibly get to fully autonomous vehicles in less than four years.