Erdmann Housing Tracker · Housing & Cities
TIER 4 Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:39:39 +0000
Scott Winship at the American Enterprise Institute recently posted on substack, "Has Marriage Fallen Because Young Adults Can't Afford Homes?...Or Are Homes Unaffordable to Young Adults Because They Marry Less?" ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- --- # Quick note on housing and family formation | | Kevin Erdmann --- | Dec 16 --- | --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- Scott Winship at the American Enterprise Institute recently posted on substack, "Has Marriage Fallen Because Young Adults Can't Afford Homes?...Or Are Homes Unaffordable to Young Adults Because They Marry Less?" Upgrade to paid For several reasons, there isn't much of a reason for me to comment. I think there may be a debate about this that is sort of near to my work, but it isn't something I have given much attention to. I don't think it's a binary question. As Winship points out, barely half as many 25 to 34 year-olds are married as they were 40 years ago. I think most of that is due to well-known cultural changes - longer average time in education delaying a full transition to independent adulthood, etc. It seems clear that there has been a significant drop in homeownership among young adults, relative to baseline expectations, related to marriage trends unrelated to housing supply or home affordability. I also think that some smaller number of 25 to 34 year-olds have delayed marriage and/or child-rearing because of the housing shortage. The importance of the latter doesn't really depend on the scale of the former, so I don't really think of these as questions to be pondered as a pair in tension with each other. And, while I think a higher rate of homeownership is generally positive, it isn't a particular focus of mine. We need 15 or 20 million more homes than we have. If we got 15 million rental homes, I would be very happy. If, instead, we got 15 million owned homes, I would be moderately happier than that. And, mostly the reason I would be moderately happier is that I would expect more home ownership to be associated with lower rents for the families who weren't owners. Homeowners are suppliers. More farmers lower the price of bread even if some of them are subsistence farmers. Also, I don't really think affordability is the most useful way of thinking about our current housing problems, as I discussed in the recent post on American living standards. Poor affordability is more clearly thought of as a measure of the housing crisis than a cause of it. So, I don't think homeowner affordability is a straightforward benchmark for thinking about the effects of the housing shortage. Anyway, that's all a long-winded way of saying I don't think I am in the target audience for Winship's post, though I am near it. But, I thought there might be one point that I am in a position to make about it. This is a little bit slapdash because I'm not sure when I will have time to get good data on these questions to really tackle it properly, so here I am just eyeballing some numbers in Winship's charts, using a couple of numbers he cited, and combining it with some data I have on renters, owners, and non-heads of households, to get at one or two broad points. Here are rough estimates of the percentage of 25 to 34 year-olds that fit in 5 categories in 1980 and 2022. | | ---|---|--- Figure 1 You can see the big decline in married couples, in general, in this age-group. Additionally, homeownership declined from about 70% to about 62% among married 25 to 34 year-olds. So, the percentage of 25 to 34 year-olds that are married homeowners declined by 24% while the percentage of married renters only declined 6%. Single homeowners increased by about 2% and single renters increased by about 9%. Somewhere around 10% of 25 to 34 year-olds are cohabitating but not officially married compared to 1980, so about 5% from the renter categories and about 5% from the non-head of household category would be in the married categories if they were counted as married. It's a small shift, but not nothing. So, 16% of the 30% of missing married homeowners are unaccounted for among renters (30% minus 9% minus 5%). They are now non-heads of households. I think the drop in marriages is mostly cultural. Most of the drop in homeownership is probably associated with that. What's missing are 7 million renters! For every additional single renter compared to 1980, there are 2 additional non-heads of households. The problem is worse than a homeowner affordability problem. The problem isn't that renters can't afford to be homeowners because they aren't getting married. The problem is that they can't afford to be renters! Or, to be pedantic, there are 15 or 20 million missing units, which would mostly be inhabited by renters. 7 million of those renters would be 25 to 34 year-olds. And, given that shortage, rents increased until 7 million 25 to 34 year-olds chose not to form households. So, I would answer both questions in Winship's title with a "yes". Are homes less affordable to young adults because they marry less? Definitely. Has marriage fallen because young adults can't afford to _buy_ homes? Yes. Probably a little bit. Has marriage fallen because young adults can't afford to _rent_ homes? Yes. Possibly this is a larger problem than not being able to buy them. Are 7 million missing households and unprecedented rent inflation a big problem, of which potentially unformed families are just one small consequence? Yes, absolutely. Upgrade to paid Also, I think there is a note to consider here about scale. It may be possible to come up with cultural reasons why young adults aren't forming as many households. The number of new households could be lower because the supply of homes has declined (the supply curve for homes has moved left, pushing the quantity demanded lower) or it could be because the demand for homes has declined (the demand curve has moved left, pushing the quantity demanded lower). In fact, the number of non-heads of households began to rise in the 1990s. Some of that is likely due to the shortage of housing in the coastal metropolitan areas that was already affecting headship by then, but some of it might be unrelated to housing economics. But, wouldn't it be odd if such a deep decline in demand was associated with rising rents? I have a paper that the Mercatus Center expects to publish this week that goes into more detail on this issue. It is clear that the quantity of housing consumed has declined sharply relative to real incomes on several dimensions (real expenditures, investment, household formation, etc.). Either relative _demand_ for housing has _**declined**_ sharply or there is an economically important supply crisis. Or some combination of the two. Under these conditions, if you are tempted to explain the shifts away from household formation I highlighted above with an exogenous decline in demand for housing, then you are implying that the supply crisis is even worse than it first appears, because all of the signs of crisis - regressively rising rents, economically motivated migration, etc. - are happening even after being ameliorated by declining demand for household formation. I think it's more simple than that. Obvious and egregious obstructions to new housing have pushed us into a host of regressive economic trends. If we remove those obstructions, the economy will naturally heal to the general improvement of American families. If you think young adults just don't want to live in their own homes or own them as much as they used to, then you should be exorcised about the scale of obstruction that it took to still create such a scale of rent inflation. Also, 16% of young adults - 7 million - who aren't spouses or partners choosing not to live on their own because of generational cultural change seems to be in tension with the popular notion that young adults are complaining about housing because they feel entitled to better housing before they can afford it. What I'm saying is, either demand for new homes has been stable and supply conditions are really bad, or demand for new homes has been unusually low for younger generations and supply conditions are really, really bad. I suppose, arithmetically, you could restate Winship's logic by saying that marriage makes housing more affordable by reducing the number of households - two young earners can join forces to purchase one house. If we had a big national meet-up for those 7 million non-heads, and they all paired up and got married and went out to buy 3.5 million new homes, those would be 3.5 million homes we don't have. I think 50% cumulative excess rent inflation is creating struggles for married and unmarried young adults, alike. But, affordability isn't the problem, it's a measure of the problem. We're short 15 or 20 million homes, and so it took 50% cumulative excess rent inflation to create 15 million non-heads of households and 5 million fewer vacancies. About 7 million of the new non-heads of households are between the ages of 25 and 34. I suppose if we had a marriage boom we would only have a 10 million unit shortage instead of a 20 million unit shortage because some of the natural long-term decline in adults per home would reverse. The long-term decline in adults per home suddenly reversed in 2008 and adults per home has been climbing since then, but it wasn't because of a marriage boom. It was because we suddenly collapsed new home supply across the country. The period after 2008 is objectively when housing has become less affordable across the country. It is a separate and discernably different issue than the delayed marriage pattern. | | ---|---|--- Figure 2 It seems self evident that housing is affordable for fewer young adults than it used to be because they are marrying less. If the stock of American homes increases by 15 or 20 million units, we will have a housing market where that reasonable logic will be relevant. Currently, we do not. You're currently a free subscriber to Erdmann Housing Tracker. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid --- | | | Like --- | | Comment --- | | Restack --- (C) 2025 Kevin Erdmann 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe