Let it Fall: Why a Real Reset Might Be the Only Way Young Adults Can Start

“Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” — Albert Einstein

My oldest son graduated with honors in mechanical engineering in May 2025—and still doesn’t have a full-time job. He moved back home and spends his days sending out applications between rebuilding old mopeds in our garage. Last week, I drove him to a job interview in Niles because he doesn’t have a car yet. I’ll drive him to his second interview next week—fingers crossed. He paid off his loans, saved what he could, and has just enough set aside to buy a car as soon as he gets a job offer.

He stopped looking at relocation jobs months ago. Anything in a major city is an automatic “no.” With inflation roaring, he doesn’t want to be far from home. When he talks about his future, it’s all “maybes”: maybe he’ll stay at home, maybe he’ll rent a small apartment for a while, maybe he’ll start his own business—though I keep reminding him that building experience and securing a reliable paycheck should probably come first.

What he doesn’t talk about is buying a home—not because he isn’t responsible or hardworking, but because the numbers simply no longer add up for people his age. Many young adults today rely on parental support far more than Gen X ever did—not because they’re entitled, but because housing and early-career wages no longer intersect in a rational way.

According to LongtermTrends.com, the home-price-to-income ratio recently hit an all-time high, with a typical U.S. home now costing about 7.04 times the median annual household income. Across major metropolitan areas — the 100 largest by population — the affordability squeeze is even more severe: in 2024, 39 markets had home prices exceeding five times local median income (up from just 15 in 2019), and in seven high-cost metros, prices surpassed eight times median income, a threshold not seen since 2006. This isn’t a market for young or first-time buyers anymore — it’s a wall, one rising faster than incomes can climb.

And here’s the beef (pun very much intended, given last week’s Uruguay post): the economy may look strong on paper—or on CNBC—but if half the country’s young adults can’t afford the most basic building block of adulthood, stable housing, then the whole story has more in common with cowshit than with economic strength.

Two conversations in November 2025 helped me understand why.

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What the Experts See That We Don’t

The first was with housing analyst Melody Wright, who lives in the trenches of data most of us never encounter—foreclosure filings, county records, investor spreadsheets. The second was a panel featuring legendary investor Marc Faber, who zoomed out an entire century to show how monetary policy and government expansion shaped the economic world my children are trying to enter.

Together, they revealed two sides of the same story: a housing market distorted from the bottom up, and an economy distorted from the top down.

Melody’s Ground-Level Reality

From Melody, here’s what stayed with me:

• The median age of today’s homebuyer—first-time or repeat—is nearly 60, according to early drafts of the 2025 NAR report.
• More than half of U.S. homes have lost value in the past year, even while listing prices remain stuck in 2021 fantasyland.
• Institutional investors who bought thousands of homes after 2009 are quietly slipping out the back door as leases expire.
• “Rage delistings” are everywhere: homeowners list at aspirational prices, get no offers, pull their homes in frustration—and stop maintaining them.
• To realign prices with median incomes, many analysts estimate we’d need a national correction of 40–50%—even more in overheated Sun Belt cities.

Melody’s data doesn’t describe a healthy market. It describes a frozen one.

Marc’s Century-Long View

Marc Faber offered the historical backdrop:

• Before central banks and modern income taxes, Western governments never consumed more than about 12% of GDP. Today, they approach 50%.
• From 1800 to 1913, the U.S. population grew twenty-fold—and everyday prices fell. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, prices have only gone up.
• Housing affordability is now the worst ever recorded, according to Goldman Sachs.
• Most young adults today have lower inflation-adjusted living standards than their parents at the same age.

He wasn’t being nostalgic—he was describing a structural reversal. When the system inflates asset prices faster than wages for decades, older generations feel wealthier, while younger generations get locked out.

Put Melody’s micro-level data and Marc’s macro-level history together, and you have my son’s situation in a nutshell.

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The Future We Lock In If Nothing Changes

If we keep propping up the market with 50-year mortgages, “portable” loans, and endless down-payment assistance programs, we’re not solving the problem—we’re stretching the rubber band until it snaps somewhere worse.

Here’s the world we get:

• Three generations under one sagging roof with DIY additions and moldy basements.
• Eight strangers forming an LLC just to afford one house, each claiming a lockable bedroom.
• Unregulated settlements growing on city edges because traditional financing is impossible.
• Backyard RVs rented for $900 a month with no working toilet.
• Entire neighborhoods of slowly rotting homes whose owners refuse to sell realistically—and refuse to fix them either.

These aren’t dystopian predictions. They’re happening already, in pockets across the country. And they accelerate when prices remain artificially high.

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The World We Could Have If Prices Reset

Now imagine something healthier.

It’s 2027 or 2028. After years of stagnation, the housing market finally resets. Prices fall roughly 47% from the 2022 peak—not because anyone cheered for it, but because denial eventually became too expensive to maintain.

Headlines scream about “wealth destruction.” But for the first time in thirty years, young adults can breathe.

My son, after landing a stable engineering job, buys a three-bedroom brick house with a new furnace. His down payment matches what young buyers used to save in 2019, because corporate investors have exited and bidding wars are a memory. His monthly payment is lower than today’s, even with higher interest rates, because the price is finally sane.

Multiply that story across thirty million households.

Airbnb signs come down. Institutional landlords cut their losses and sell to real families. Housing returns to its purpose: shelter, stability, the foundation of a life—not a lottery ticket or retirement plan. “Real estate always goes up” starts to sound as dated as “dot-com stocks never go down.”

A healthy market re-emerges—one where a normal home costs roughly two to three times a normal income. Where young adults don’t need dual six-figure salaries or government programs just to start a family. Where you don’t need crypto or viral side hustles to afford a roof.

For the first time in decades, adulthood becomes possible again.

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The Roadblock Isn’t Greed—it’s Grief

The seller who rage-delists isn’t immoral. He’s grieving.

He was told his house would fund his retirement. That it would always rise in value. That it was his reward for a lifetime of work. Accepting less feels like admitting the story wasn’t true.

But we can’t build a future for one generation based on a fantasy that harms the next.

Eventually, the market will resolve the grief the only way grief is ever resolved—by confronting reality.

Yes, it will be painful. Surgery always is.

But I would rather see my own home lose half its paper value than watch my children lose twenty years of their lives to an economic system that turned shelter into a casino.

A reset is not the end of the American dream. It is the only way the dream becomes available again to the people meant to inherit it.

Let it fall. Let it clear. Let the next generation finally begin.

If this essay challenged the way you think about housing, affordability, and the future we’re building, you can support my work on Patreon, BuyMeACoffee, or Substack. Every contribution helps me continue researching, writing, and sharing ideas for a more livable future.