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By Giulia Carbonaro
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The skyrocketing cost of housing has overtaken food prices and even concerns about democracy as the top political issue for young Americans, according to a new poll, adding new urgency to a crisis that is affecting not only household budgets but potentially where young voters choose to live—and how the country votes.
CNBC’s All-America Economic Survey for the second quarter of 2026, which polled 1,000 registered voters across the United States between July 8 and 12, found that housing cost was the top issue for respondents between 18 and 34 years old and for men between 18 and 49 years old.
Across all survey participants, the cost of housing was identified as the fourth-most important issue facing the country right now (24 percent), trailing the cost of food and groceries (36 percent), protecting democracy (29 percent), and immigration and border security (25 percent). The cost of healthcare came right after the cost of housing, at 22 percent.
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Among participants aged 35 to 49 years of all genders, housing cost was the second-most important issue after the cost of food and groceries.
What this shows us is that the unfolding housing affordability crisis is affecting Americans differently depending on their age and whether they have already managed to step onto the property ladder or not - penalizing young renters struggling to access homeownership.
Young Americans Are Being Priced Out of the American Dream
Home values nationwide have soared by 54 percent since 2020, according to the latest data by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS), as historically low borrowing costs during the pandemic sparked a home-buying frenzy that clashed with a chronic shortage of inventory across the country.
As of May, the latest Redfin data available, the median sale price of the typical U.S. home was $398,771, up from $391,000 a year earlier and $315,700 in May 2019.
Starter homes, typically smaller and cheaper than other properties on the market and traditionally an affordable option for first-time buyers, “have risen at the same rate as the overall market,” Hannah Jones, senior economic research analyst at Realtor.com, previously told Newsweek, climbing by nearly 35 percent since 2019.
They have also become rarer, with the pool of homes priced at $350,000 or below falling from roughly 60 percent of all for-sale listings in the first quarter of 2019 to about 40 percent in the first quarter of 2026, according to Realtor.com data.
Since the pandemic, other housing costs have climbed in step, including mortgage rates, which are now hovering just above the 6.5 percent mark, according to Freddie Mac.
Between 2019 and 2025, property taxes have surged by over 30 percent, based on JCHS data. Driven by more frequent and more severe extreme weather events, home insurance premiums have climbed 46 percent since 2021, according to Insurify—roughly three times as much as inflation.
While home value hikes have given homeowners the advantage of accumulating precious equity, these other increases have added a considerable financial burden on their shoulders.
According to the latest Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Home Ownership Affordability Monitor (HOAM) data, the median-income household would now need to spend 66.38 percent of its income to own the median-priced home - which means they would be heavily cost-burdened.
For many young Americans who have not had a chance to build up equity like maybe their parents or grandparents, rising costs have brought no benefits at all.
Their struggle to step onto the property ladder is evident in the data: according to the American Community Survey, the homeownership rate for household heads between 25- and 34-year-olds has fallen from 47 percent in 2005 - before the financial crisis - to 37 percent in 2015. In 2024, it was 40 percent - still lower than previous generations at the same age.
The latest data from the National Association of Realtors also shows that first-time homebuyers represented only 21 percent of all buyers in 2025, and their average age was a record high of 40 years old. Baby boomers, on the other hand, still dominated the market as a majority of both sellers (55 percent) and buyers (42 percent).
Young Americans Are Moving In Search of Affordability—Potentially Shaping a Different Future
While the housing affordability crisis is a nationwide problem, it hits Americans differently according to where they live in the country. High-cost areas of the country with severe housing shortages, like the Northeast and the coastal West, have long been losing residents to more affordable cities in the South and the Midwest.
In 2024, according to Realtor.com data, small rural towns and counties across the country were the ones gaining more young residents, with Jefferson, Georgia, Prineville, Oregon, and Sandpoint, Idaho, leading this growth. Meanwhile, big, expensive metropolitan areas like San Francisco, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Honolulu faced the highest outbound movement of residents between 25 and 44 years old.
On a state level, Americans of all ages are flocking to affordable destinations in the South and Midwest. According to the latest Census data, South Carolina, Idaho, and North Carolina saw the biggest population increase in 2025 from net domestic migration, relative to their population sizes. Within the same period, the states that shrank the most from net domestic migration outflows—meaning more people moved out than in—included New York, Hawaii, Alaska, and California.
We have reasons to believe many of these movers were young people. Americans between 18 and 34 have the highest geographic mobility rates in the country, driven by career and education, though overall domestic migration has slowed significantly since the end of the pandemic.
Between 2005 and 2023, millennials as a generation represented the biggest share of Americans moving across the country, followed by Gen Zers, according to Census data.
Young Americans’ frustration with high rents, expensive starter homes, and limited savings - and their willingness to move across state lines in the pursuit of affordability - has the potential to influence the nation in more ways than one, including how the country votes.
Nine of the top 10 counties to which Americans between 25 and 44 years old moved between 2020 and 2023 voted for President Donald Trump in 2024, according to an analysis by Business Insider. In November, dissatisfaction with the way the president is handling the economy and housing might backfire against the Republican Party instead.
A recent Harvard poll found that more young registered U.S. voters vote Democrat than Republican (45 percent to 26 percent). CNBC’s All-America Economic Survey found that respondents trusted Democrats (38 percent) more than Republicans (32 percent) on handling housing, and Jay Campbell of Hart Research, the Democratic pollster for the survey, told the news channel that “housing could be the healthcare of 2024” for Democrats trying to turn out young voters.
Asked who they would prefer to control Congress after November, respondents gave Democrats a modest edge (49 percent to 45 percent) over Republicans, with a margin of error for the survey of 3.1 percent.
That suggests that housing, already one of the top problems facing the country for U.S. voters in the 2024 presidential election, could prove a defining issue in the upcoming midterms, slipping beyond the personal—delaying homeownership, family formation and moves and becoming electoral.
Contact Newsweek editors about this story: John Fitzpatrick and Sam Wilson.
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